The Education Business Blog

How can technology and innovation reshape education? Union Square Ventures put on Hacking Education - a conference that brought educators and entrepreneurs together to hash this out. Unfortunately they didn't have any practitioners from the education technology and publishing industries there. After reviewing the well written summary of the discussion I put together the following extended comment to add the perspective of someone who was there, did that, and got the t-shirts.

As someone who has spent the last 18 years in the Education Technology and Instructional Materials businesses I feel the commentary misses the mark from a business perspective. This isn't a critique of what was was covered - many of the participants are people I admire and cite frequently - Danah Boyd, Fred Wilson, Katie Salen, Steven Johnson , NT Etuk etc. It is meant to talk specifically about the business challenges of translating these great ideas into practice.

It might be tempting to dismiss folks who have been in the trenches as old school - people who "don't get it" - but some of us are not clinging to old paradigms but working hard to create new ones. Experience may blind us to new possibilities - but it may also guide you around some of the land mines many of us have already stepped on.

Most of us who have followed this path have been guilty of advocating massive changes through technology. Sometimes this takes the form the kind of carpet bombing Danah talks about - just throw enough CPUs/Bandwidth etc at the problem and it will magically happen. Other times it is the old saw about having a hammer and the world looking like a nail - see game based learning.

Both approaches share four problems:

1. They never address the scale issue. You can always find success with a few small experiments. If you have been around the market you see the same examples trotted out again and again. As a sales rep for Apple 18 years ago I told stories exactly like Gepettos. They are heart warming inspirational tales of learning and adventure - they are not a scalable business model.

We educate 54 million children in this country - develop a solution that will work for more than 500 at a time and you have something. Remember that in most communities the school system is the first or second largest employer. We spend $550 billion a year on education in the US - second only to the military. You can't run from the scale issue if you want to create businesses that serve the market as opposed to a very narrow niche.

2. Educational practice evolves incrementally and nothing ever goes away. Video games will have a huge impact on learning (they already are) but they are just one more tool in the bag. When a teacher uses and interactive white board it is the functional equivalent of scratching charcoal on a cave wall.

I believe we are at an inflection point and that education is ready for real technology substitution (see this in depth series here about it) but it will probably take a different form in education than it has in our personal media diet.

The most interesting design challenge in our market today is designing systems of instructional products (print, tech, professional development, social media) that amplify and compliment each other. To date most of the energy has gone into siloed products created by technologists or print publishers without any meaningful cross over. Most print publishers create technology that attempts to recreate the book experience on-line - snore. Most technologists are on a mission to kill traditional practices. Both miss what educators are asking for - blended products that use the best of all media.


3. The user developed content model assumes a motivated learner. On-line classes work best for the same students traditional correspondence courses worked for - i.e. not your potential drop outs but those with an extra dose of motivation. See item 1 - I've seen dozens of businesses that were able to get a few hundred users doing creative and interesting learning on-line that were never able to scale up.

Apex Learning which does on-line classes finally settled on AP level courses because those students work well for the environment. The rest of our learners need an actively involved coach and guide to work with them - a teacher. Products that are designed for a blended environment are the scalable answer for broad numbers of students - some on-line some real world.

The group talked about how kids are required to attend school by law. You also need to factor in that schools are required by law to educate all kids, including the ones who don't want to be there. It is a two way street. Innovative materials can go a long way towards addressing this - Tabula Digita's Algebra games are a great example of using technology to improve engagement with the content. UGC won't magically help these kids.

4. Poorly designed economics. Every time an idea runs into problems addressing scale or market needs people start talking about the home school market followed by the private school market. My BS meter goes off whenever I see this in a business plan (or comment thread). These are sizable markets - but each is only about 10% of the whole in students and considerably less than that in dollars. From a distribution standpoint they are also the most diffuse - making it extremely expensive to reach them for very small sales.

The web is definitely helping here, but at the end of the day if you are only going after these segments you are not hacking education - you are chipping away at the fringes. The biggest change will come from working with public schools to address the needs of a broad range of learners.

Christiansen's work would tell you that these are the markets where the innovation will occur first, but I'm not convinced. I think there are segments of the public system where disruptive changes can flourish - ELL and Special Education are two examples. Traditional materials don't work for these kids (disclosure - I'm CEO of a Special Ed Publisher).

Atomized Instructional Content as a Business Model

Another idea that runs into problems with the economics is atomized content. There has been a huge amount of buzz around this for the past few years - the idea being that if we can just turn instructional materials into the equivalent of iTunes teachers will be free to pick and choose the best bits and assemble them in meaningful ways.

This is a very seductive concept but misses an important distinction about educational content. A lesson structure is a bit like an operating system on a computer. If cut/copy/paste are done differently in every application it is very difficult to scale a platform. The user can't use a common base of experience to manage other tools. The same holds true for instructional materials. I'm not advocating traditional textbooks but something in between. Strands of content that can drop in for a week or two rather than an entire years worth.

Try this thought experiment from a business perspective. Assume you have a front line supervisor who has 25 direct reports. Best practice would argue for between 5-8 reports. How much time will that Supervisor have to think strategically about the business? Now imagine that they are required to submit daily and weekly progress reports on all 25 employees - no slacking off on a few of them for a week or two. This is your average teacher. They don't have time to assemble mix tapes of content for all their students.

This conference asked all the right questions. But Education is not a mirror of other markets. I stopped reading the newspaper and my life became richer through social media and blogs. But I can't imagine my kids getting a great education (as they have) if it was left up to our family to sort it out on our own. We need an educational system and if you want to build a business (at least in the near term of the next 5-10 years) you will need to find your entry point into the one that exists.

This is an enormously interesting time to be in the education market. We share the belief that the ultimate killer app is learning - the mind is wired for it. The businesses that can re-engineer publishing to support 21st Century learners and educators will have a bright future.

Related Blog Posts

Education Marketing 101 - A four part primer on entering the K12 Education Market.

Technology Substitution and Textbooks 4 part series

10 Ideas for Building Education Products for 21st Century Learners part of the Information Overload series

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Posted In: Education Technology , K12 Publishing , Serious Games

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If you don't think story-line matters in instructional materials just look at the pie fight over evolution in Texas. At its root this is a battle over which story we use to make sense of how we got here. Advocates on both sides will be unhappy with this characterization - for them the fight is over the truth. My goal in this piece is not to take sides in this argument (I do have one) but to talk about the power of story-line in instruction.

"And The Moral of the Story Is..."

Theories, metaphors, legends, myths, etc. are all attempts to impose order on our perception of the world. These stories give us a shared shorthand to help us make decisions about how to think and act. Without the moment of "oh this is like the time when x did y in the story about z" we'd forever be stuck deciding what to do next - stories help us be efficient. It is so wired that our brains even make up stories when we are sleeping - dreams may not make literal sense to our left brain but our pattern seeking right brain has the steering wheel during those hours.

One of the challenges of publishing in a world of standards designed by committees is that it is often hard to detect the broad story-line since those standards represent a series of compromises. This is particularly problematic in arenas where fundamental questions are discussed (like evolution). We end up with the intellectual equivalent of milk toast rather than chewy rye.

This is very similar to the critiques heard frequently in the blogosphere about the "he said she said" nature of TV reporting where every issue has to have two equal sides. As Daniel Moynihan quipped "people are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts." The credibility of TV reporting suffers because we know at a deep level that the way they present things is not real. Many instructional materials suffer from the same credibility destroying "balance."

If we look outside of education at the arenas where people get their information they are all dominated by story-lines - TV, books, video games, movies, blogs, and arguably twitter (@ingenbio is active again - great use of twitter to tell a story). But - when we publish textbooks we run from story-lines to avoid controversy.

The Problem

As a publisher, the business case for avoiding many story-lines (and the controversy that comes with them) is pretty compelling. We can't afford to alienate factions on the decision making committees. Bland is safe. Publishers are lining up to print something that will cover the bases in Texas.

Many educators are wary of stories because they have frequently been used to impose one perspective. This approach can stray into outright propaganda. Just because something is presented as a story-line does not mean it is true, or good, or useful (the Nazi's had a strong story-line).

But, looking at it from an instructional perspective, avoiding story-line removes one of the most powerful teaching tools we have. Story-line taps a fundamental structure of the mind. We end up with a meandering thread of facts and fictions that don't hang together.

We end up with the modern textbook. Meh.

Fear vs. Trust

It strikes me that the motivating force to avoiding strong story-lines in instructional materials is fear. Fear that learners will accept as truth ideas which we might see as dangerous. Fear that the teacher won't be equipped to get students to probe deeply and develop critical thinking. Fear that a teacher will propagandize students. Fear that we will lose the sale to a safer alternative. Fear that our world view might not be as solid as we want/need it to be.

Actions motivated by fear almost always make the world a smaller place. Bland instructional materials avoid controversy, but they are not as effective as they could be. In the global economy we can't afford to sacrifice effectiveness to fear.

The opposite of this kind of fear is trust. Trust that learners can critically judge information. Trust that teachers will respect different view points. Trust that our worldview can be challenged and that we can grow if needed. Trust that our materials will be effective enough that we can win business against "safer" alternatives. When we trust our world gets larger but we wade into controversy, we embrace debate, and we challenge ourselves to grow. This isn't always fun, but it is more effective in the long run because it makes us stronger.

Most schools expose students to the story-line the Nazi's spun along with the facts of what transpired when people acted on it. There is deep learning in this approach. In this case, presenting them with the story and facts serves as an intellectual inoculation. If we shrink in fear that some students might find that story compelling (sadly some will) we avoid the larger benefit of a shared understanding that we need to fight this kind of thinking when we encounter it again (sadly we will).

Reading the Tea Leaves

I suspect we will see strong story-lines creeping back in via non-traditional media first. Look to formats like video games which are inherently story telling platforms (even if it is as silly as getting the jewels from the lobster people to free the princess). I believe the engagement that comes from a good story is part of the reason games have shown disproportionate impact on struggling learners - the story gives their mind something to adhere to as the learning is going on. This binding thread is missing in the textbooks which have failed these students.

As starting points look to Chris Dede's work on River City or Constance Steinkuhler's work on scientific discourse in World of Warcraft for more on this. Go visit the nutrition area on Whyville where students get their avatars purposely ill to learn what healthy eating looks liike. Heck - look at the enduring success of Oregon Trail.

This isn't an easy problem to solve. Traditional publishers will follow the lead of the market even when there is compelling evidence to support change. Educators operate in a political arena that makes controversial innovation difficult.

What should Texas do regarding the Evolution controversy? If we operate from trust students should be exposed to all the competing story-lines and they should be presented in their strongest contexts (e.g. evolution in the science classroom, creationism in comparative religion). From this robust exchange students should be free to weave their own story together in a way that makes their lives meaningful. If we don't trust them to do this we make their world a smaller place.

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Related Post Developing Reading Fluency = Grinding in Video Games

Relevant Excerpt - "Many (not all) low performing students don't have a story thread in their lives that helps motivate them to grind in school (doing homework). Students who are high achievers generally have a story line that is central to their identity that gives the grind meaning and a purpose. Without that story line much school work is just tedium."

"The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling" (Rives Collins, Pamela J. Cooper)

"The Power of Story: Change Your Story, Change Your Destiny in Business and in Life" (Jim Loehr)

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Posted In: K12 Publishing , Policy , Serious Games

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A new free white paper that tackles the practical challenges teachers face when they use video games was released this week by the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA). I was the author of the paper and the co-chair of the working group that produced the paper.

Barrels of ink and pixels by the gigabit have been spilled trying to answer the question "Do video games work as teaching tools?" We started from a simpler perspective - assuming that games can support learning what are the practical tips that teachers can use to boost the odds of success? We interviewed the pioneers in the classroom and at the companies that have developed successful games and summarized their hard won insights in the paper.

I excerpt the executive summary below and over the coming days will post some of the more detailed findings. For the complete paper visit the SIIA's website and download the PDF.

Most of what we surfaced is applied common sense that goes with any supplemental implementation. There are some key differences with games that we emphasize in the paper.

The paper is organized into three main sections:

1. Selling the Idea - How can you convince your school to try games?
2. Preparation - What should the teacher do to prepare themselves, their students, the classroom, and the technical infrastructure?
3. Implementation - What classroom management approaches work best with games and simulations?

Summary ...

The effective deployment of any instructional resource requires the support of teachers. Educators cannot feel threatened, be uncomfortable, or lose control when they use something new. With EduGames, the potential for all three of these issues is higher, so a well crafted strategy to address them is essential. Administrators need to understand their unique role and see resources that they can use to explain the project to stakeholders. If an administrator is driving the deployment, he/she needs to be prepared to support a wide range of teacher familiarity and comfort with EduGames. Administrators will need to be equipped with research and references that can be shared with parents and the press. Information Technology groups will prioritize stability, efficacy, network safety and cost control when they evaluate new products. Advocates for EduGames need to earn the trust of IT early in the process, or the project can be shut down before it even begins. Students should not feel threatened, and they need to understand how it will work. They also have sophisticated filters for good games and won’t easily tolerate poor design. As with any new instructional resource, gaining parental support is an important part of the political process. Widespread misconceptions about games can stall efforts unless you are prepared to address them. Regularly inform parents of the purpose, scope, and results of the project. Demonstrate the connection to 21st Century Skills to earn the support of the community. Where possible invite parents into the process.

A holistic approach that addresses technical infrastructure, installation, support resources, professional development, and lesson planning covers most of the bases. Because EduGames are still largely unknown to most educators, implementation services can not be optional. In order to reach sustained -- rather than experimental -- usage, schools and districts need to dedicate time and money to preparing the environment thoroughly. Districts vary widely in technology infrastructure, the openness of IT to new solutions and their general policies about games and learning. However, in general, advocates need to acknowledge that games need extra support and cooperation from IT. Implementing any new instructional approach requires professional development. Even teachers who are gamers do not intuitively know how to use games in the classroom. Tightly link professional development and initial student use -- any delay can lead to problems. Plan on a minimum of a ½ day on-site with hands-on time in teams. Teachers need to understand how the activities connect to the standards, what the goals are for the exercise, and which students it can benefit the most. They should also introduce the games at a pace they are comfortable with. Teachers are the lynch pin to success. Get the right teachers on board, and they will inspire their students and the other teachers in your building. Ideally you want people who are leaders – politically, technically, and pedagogically.

The majority of the comments we received on teaching strategies related to blended learning. Mix game play with discussion, lecture, reading and writing to gain the most benefits.

Panelists encouraged others to tap those aspects of games that make them fun – competition, failure, and transgressive play.

Lessons and game activities should be organized so they can be “consumed” in a 45-50 minute class period. It can be useful to start small in order to accommodate the natural learning curve teachers and students will need before they become proficient with a new resource.

There are pedagogical and practical reasons for having students play in teams of 2-4 rather than alone. Pedagogically, games force collaborative decision making. Grouping helps reduce barriers to learning by grouping proficient gamers with non-gamers. Practically, working in teams lowers the technology footprint needed, and it allows students to cover for each other during absences.

Classroom management for EduGames is very similar to any hands on activity.

An actively involved teacher providing content expertise and focus moves things along.

Games appear to be particularly good at encouraging peer tutoring.

To date, behavioral issues like bullying have not been an issue.

Backend integration with the school’s management systems relieves a lot of the administrative burden from teachers.

Given the novelty of game-based learning, many educators remain skeptical of the games’ ability to facilitate learning or to embed assessments appropriately. It is important to provide external validation of the learning that is taking place. Over time, if games deliver as promised, we expect educators to become more comfortable with in-game assessments.

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Piping hot education related blog topics served here! The debate over formative assessment, the top 10 sites for educational games, crowd-sourcing the next great novel, controversy around Microsoft's new ads, the relationship between quality and advertising, and a hilarious spoof of Politicians all get the nod this week.

Education Week has a very interesting article about Formative Assessment. Given the burgeoning mantra that formative assessment makes the biggest difference in outcomes it is revealing to see how little consensus there is on what it really is. Is it a practice or is it a product?

John Rice has a list of the top 10 sites for free EduGames. It is worth a peek and linking through to get a sense of what kids are actually playing. This should dispel the myth that EduGames need to rival commercial games in graphics and sound. What matters most is fun game play.

HarperCollins launches Authonomy. The site uses crowd-sourcing to allow readers to vote on the next best seller. Springwise has a quick overview - Publisher Hopes Crowds Will Spot Next Bestseller. I'm working on a similar project for a client in education - should be interesting.

Microsoft's new ads - love 'em or hate 'em? Seth Godin thinks they are rot that won't fix what is wrong - What Ads Can't Fix. His thesis is that the company has a solid business serving the stolid core of the market, and ads are not going to turn it into Apple. Ben McConnel believes they are a great opening salvo in redefining who Microsoft is by reclaiming the definition from Apple. As a bonus all the ads are in his post if you want to see them. In this debate you could substitute mainline textbook publishers and come up with largely the same analysis - both posts are worth a 2 minute read and some reflection.

As always Indexed nails her topic. This graphic about quality vs. advertising is amusing and revealing. We know this is how the education market works - one teacher tells another when they like something. I think of her wry charts as Mad Magazine for grownups. There is no connection to the link above about Microsoft. Really.

The Front Fell Off. Perhaps because we are dealing with a financial disaster this comedy skit resurfaced recently. It is a drop-dead funny take on a Politician evading the truth and trying to sound like they have a clue when they really don't. It is non-partisan so enjoy.

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Posted In: Culture , Education Technology , K12 Publishing , Marketing Management , Serious Games

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Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important.

Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets so wide that it becomes much harder to bridge it. The chart below illustrates this concept.

[This chart is for illustrative purposes only]

In the early grades - K-3 - the focus is on acquiring basic skills in reading and math. As soon as the shift to applying those skills to learning other subjects occurs in 4th and 5th grade the gap begins to widen. By the time students have reached 7th grade it is often so great that only heroic efforts can help. When a student drops out in 10th grade the cause can be traced all the way back to 2nd grade or even Kindergarten. Obama's experience in the Chicago Public Schools taught him this lesson.

We can see this clearly in the product lines of the supplemental publishers. Their materials for the early grades are mostly targeted interventions, what a friend dubbed "workbookity" stuff. Their materials for secondary schools are comprehensive alternative textbooks. In secondary schools the gap has widened so far that you can't teach all students with the same textbook because the low performers simply can't read it.

Oral language is hard wired into humans but reading and writing are acquired skills - very similar to music in that practice helps enormously. Hence the focus on fluency in the National Reading Panel's report. By the time students reach the 6th grade students who read regularly have often read at least 1 million more words than students who do not. That makes a huge difference.

So targeting the early grades - when the gap can be closed quickly and easily - is an essential part of school reform. Yes - it will take 12 years to see the benefits - but they will be long lasting throughout the lives of the children who benefit. I believe Obama has got this issue right.

Does this mean that there is no hope for kids in the higher grades? Absolutely not. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about video games for learning is that the research out of Harvard and other universities who are studying this topic shows that it disproportionately benefits students in the lower third of performance and that the biggest benefits come in the middle school years. The Tabula Digita study out of Florida is only the latest in a string of studies suggesting that this one way to reach these kids. One other interesting finding - for every 2 hours that kids play game they spend an hour reading about them.

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Education technology bloggers have been a busy lot with NECC 08, end of school year, and lots of new products to play with. Here are just a smattering of some of my favorite posts from the past few weeks. Enjoy.

John Rice flagged an article showing that putting games in libraries increases reading. This jibes with a presentation I saw last week at Games Learning & Society - a public librarian started doing game nights and they saw their youth circulation double - for BOOKS. This is going to make several people in my house happy - Mrs. Education Business Blog is a middle school librarian and the EBB spawn are avid gamers and readers.

Danah Boyd shares some meaty insights on status and online behavior for teens. The money quote:

In his book "Geeks, Freaks and Cool Kids," Murray Milner Jr. suggests that teens' particular obsession with status is because "they have so little real economic or political power" (2004:4). He argues that hanging out, dating, and mobilizing tokens of popular culture all play a central role in the development and maintenance of peer status. Just as these activities take place in school, they also take place in networked environments.

Continuing in the meme of bad marketing that I've been on lately David Armano names several bad habits marketers fall into. Funny and instructive at the same time. My personal favorite - shiny object syndrome. Let me know yours.

Want to have your pre-conceptions about school challenged? David Kirkpatrick compiles a list of provactive questions nobody dares to ask about education. I don't agree with everything on the list - but it it made me stop and think.

If you come across something interesting in your web perambulations pass them along!

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Are you interested in how video games and simulations support teaching and learning? Then the 4th annual GLS is where you should be this week. For my money it is the lowest signal to noise event that I attend all year. Oh - and you get to play some really fun games.

Here are a few random observations from day one - by no means a comprehensive review of the event or the topics covered.

In the opening session Cory Ondrejka noted that all the interesting questions about games and learning are interdisciplinary. This is a real challenge because in the institutional structure of a university there is no political base to sustain research.

Katie Salen challenged the group to think bigger - she feels we are in danger of not working to implement the things we are finding out at scale. I'm not sure I agree completely with here given some projects that I'm aware of - but those may not be visible to the academic community.

Kurt Squire noted that we need to move beyond just games and look at the conditions they create. This is in sync with a conversation I had with Atsusi "2C" Hirumi the other day where he talked about focusing on the elements of "interactive media" rather than just "games." I think this is an excellent distinction and could also help address Katie's concerns.

David Shaffer presented some really interesting work on assessment - essentially a model for testing an evolving worldview (epistemic frame) not just discrete knowledge and skills. There is a lot of math - but this approach basically measures the relationship between several important criteria (values, skills, etc.) over time. It has some really intriguing implications for measuring 21st Century Skills. To Cory's point this is possible because David is bringing a cross disciplinary toolkit of psychological techniques together educational theory and interactive media.

There is a strong thread of using game design itself to teach 21st Century Skills. I worry that this is a bit of having a hammer so the world looks like a nail. In the end while many schools are giving lip service to 21st Century Skills they are getting measured and rewarded for improving reading and math scores. Until we can help them directly with that challenge we won't get permission to go deeper.

A random observation - if you want to encourage groups of kids to work together your games need to work more like Craps and less like Blackjack. The whole table wins at Craps together so you get a lot of crosstalk. In Blackjack you can take my "pefect" card - we play against the dealer but we don't play together. It is a quieter game.

The game room is also great - Madison is alive with GTA, Wii Fitness Fanatics, Rock Star. and Portal. Lots of fun stuff to preview and test out. I'm embarrassed about my Wii Fitness score - my only excuse is I'm coming off a month of back problems. Sigh.

The Jason Project previewed Resilient Planet - which looks like a great game for teaching scientific thinking by recreating ground breaking experiments in the field with guidance from experts. Kudos to them for this work.

I did a preliminary release of the white paper I'm writing for the Software Information Industry Association on Best Practices for Implementing Games in the Classroom. It was well received and several practitioners validated the findings as consistent with their experience. I''ll post more on this separately.

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Posted In: Culture , Serious Games

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The reaction of many parents and educators to the idea of playing games in school is horror. School is supposed to be serious hard work. What these people don't know is that in modern video games doing tasks repetitively to slowly build skills and status is the norm not the exception. These games are all about "hard" play.

Gamers have a term for this - grinding. Grinding is spending two months getting your mining skills up so that you can make a special suit of armor for your friends. Grinding is repeatedly doing some menial chore for a faction so you can earn status with them and get access to skills they can teach you.

Educators also have a term of art for this kind of activity - they call it building fluency. We learn most of the hardest skills in life through a slow process of accretion that amounts to building fluency. According to reading experts a child needs to read several million words in order to become a fluent reader.

Accelerated Reader is essentially a game about reading that is a long steady grind. Like a game you get rapid feedback, frequent promotions, and status from completing the tasks. It didn't get to be "the world's most widely used reading software" by mistake.

But the concept of fluency goes far beyond reading. Learning to play an instrument, writing, using a knife, flirting, skateboarding and thousands of other human activities all share the need to grind it out over time to develop that effortless fluency that is the mark of an expert.

This raises the question of why a child would engage in the grind to fluency? My theory, based on gamer culture, is that it is a critical part of building identity. Players will do routine and menial tasks over and over again to build the story line of their character in the game. It is a fundamental building block of identity - if it was easy there would be no status associated with becoming fluent.

How does this apply to school? Many (not all) low performing students don't have a story thread in their lives that helps motivate them to grind in school (doing homework). Students who are high achievers generally have a story line that is central to their identity that gives the grind meaning and a purpose. Without that story line much school work is just tedium.

If this is true (a big if) what is role of publishers in helping educators and parents guide students to the stories that will motivate them? I believe our role is to bring new tools and approaches to bear that have more story embedded in them, stories that students can appropriate and make their own as they build their identity.

If you want clues on how to do that - you only need to head down to your local Game Stop.

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It has been a while since I did a round up of blog articles, time to clean a few items out. Rather than dump a long list I've picked four articles I've found particularly interesting in the past few weeks.

Matt Mihaly over at The Forge notes that MMO's/Virtual Worlds are some of the most valuable private tech firms in the world. I would add to Matt's observation that 3 of the 4 firms he cites in the top 20 are for kids. Silicon Alley Insider's original article is here.

Chris Anderson over at The Long Tail has an interesting take on the decline of the newspaper industry that is directly relevant to education publishing. Sure, readership is down, but at $45b it is still twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined. The money quote:

The truth is that the newspaper business is still a huge industry and will be around in one form or another for the rest of my life. That is not to dismiss the declines, but only to note that there's still a lot of money there and what is required is strategic change, not giving up the ghost.

The Happy Worker Kit - coming to an office near you soon. Funny.

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Crayon Physics from Kloonigames is a very cool serious game. I can see young kids in particular playing with this for hours. The designer said about one comment "Chris Baker wrote a great article about Crayon Physics Deluxe for Slate. He wrote that the game looks like it was designed by a third-grater. I take that as a compliment."

If you don't get video games this is an excellent video to watch. The kinds of puzzles kids are solving in Portal and World of Warcraft are very similar to the ones you see here. But with the interface stripped down to bare essentials you can get a sense of the brain work that is going on while players wrestle with the more complicated games.

If you want a sense of how engaging this kind of simple interface with some basic physics can be go play Linerider for a while. It only take a couple of minutes to learn it - then see if you don't want to just PLAY.

This also reminds me a lot of And Yet It Moves - a great indie game that got some attention last year at GDC.

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Does real learning happen in virtual worlds?

Cable in the Classroom Magazine published an article I wrote on this topic in their March issue.

The premise is:

"There have always been scientific concepts our children should experience that are too dangerous, too expensive, or too time-consuming for school. For these activities - some of the most thought provoking in science - we have had to settle for lectures and reading.

Virtual worlds change this equation. In a virtual world, students can use million dollar apparatus, experiment with lethal substances, and compress years of activity into a few weeks...."

If you have thoughts on what I wrote leave a comment here and I'll respond.

Download the complete article (PDF) by clicking on the image to the right.

All the links referenced in the article are below the fold - continue reading to see them.

Continue reading "Virtual Worlds = Real Learning" »

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Ed Note: Do videogames embody the best in cognitive theory? In Part 2 of his series on educational video games guest blogger NT Etuk explores the work of James Paul Gee. Part 1 is here

By NT Etuk - CEO Tabula Digita

Why do videogames work? Why are gamers so willing to learn in these environments but so unwilling to learn in school?

Fortunately, some of the answers lie in the research of an extremely well regarded literacy professor. Dr. James Paul Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State, and the author of the book "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition”

Dr. Gee as an educator was curious about why videogames were able to do so much that our education system was having trouble doing – continuously engaging students, making students feel safe failing (not silly), unafraid to ask questions, and providing contextual learning that makes the learning relevant to the learner.
So he set out to answer these questions. His book is an excellent read and I encourage everyone to read it, but for the sake of brevity, I will pull out a core part of his findings.

Dr. Gee found that commercial videogames are built on a set of design principles, and that these principles translate into some of the more fundamental learning principles that cognitive theory has validated.

Among them are:

1. Active, Critical Learning Principle – [In a videogame] all aspects of the learning environment are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.

2. “Psychosocial Moratorium” Principle – [In a videogame] learners can take risks in a space where real world consequences (i.e. grades, risk of looking silly) are lowered.

3. Achievement Principle – [In a videogame] there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner’s level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.

4. Practice Principle – [In a videogame] - learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
5. Multimodal Principle – [In a videogame] - meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.

These are principles built into all good videogames. I have listed 5, but there are 36 that Dr. Gee documents.

As you read through them, hopefully it becomes clear how videogame systems can actually translate into tremendously powerful and flexible learning systems. Tabula Digita [link] and other companies pioneering this arena embrace these principles and look to embed as many of these principles as possible in the design of our games.

The good thing is that school systems are beginning to realize the inherent power of simulations. I can only speak from our company’s experiences, but Tabula Digita games and simulations have been accepted in some of the largest and sometimes most conservative school districts in the country, including Plano ISD, Orange County - Florida, New York City Public Schools, Forsyth County, and Chicago Public Schools among others.

Educational gaming methodologies and pedagogical approaches have been accepted as superior by some of the most rigorous judges out there. Orange County educators published a list of 54 intervention products that they recommend their teachers use. Tabula Digita simulations received the highest Rubric score of ‘A’ and the highest educator recommendation rating of 4 stars. Only 4 other products were rated so highly. Two were non-computer based.

And students are singing the praises of educational games and simulations, with approximately 88% of the students who have used our software recommending it to other students and over 90% saying they wished more simulations were in their classrooms.

There is a paradigm shift that is occurring in education and it’s being forced by our industry’s ultimate customer – the student. Today’s child demands immersion. They demand experience. They demand engagement. And their expectations of how they receive, interpret, and absorb information are growing more sophisticated every day. As educators, if our methods don’t adapt to their needs, we run the risk of irrelevance. And if we’re irrelevant then we run the risk that we can’t talk to them. And if that happens, then how will they ever hear what we have to say …. ?

About Tabula Digita:
Tabula Digita is the award winning publisher of the DimensionM series of educational videogame titles. DimensionM titles encompass action and non-action titles and allow students to play other students within classrooms, across schools, and across the country, all while learning and increasing achievement.

Related Blog Posts

Link to Part 1 in this series.

Slaying Myths About Video Games In Schools

Virtual Worlds for Education - 1987 Redux?
Games for Education- Essential Resource Links

Continue reading "Video Games Embody the Best in Cognitive Theory - Part 2" »

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Ed Note: Are video games and simulations essential learning tools for the 21st Century? Guest Blogger NT Etuk responds to my post about Ethics in the first of two posts on this topic.

By NT Etuk – CEO and Co-Founder, Tabula Digita.

Video games and simulations are among the most efficient learning tools ever built. Period. This is not a guess. It is not a hypothesis. If you don't agree I'd like to share the perspective of someone who is working with schools to incorporate video games into classroom practice.

But first, let’s reset our minds about videogames. If you can, forget all of the media hype. Forget all of the preconceptions about how good or bad they are for children. Instead, let’s take a fresh look. Let’s view videogames from a new perspective and together let us really see what’s happening …

In fact, let’s look at this through the eyes of a child …

Process Matters

When a child picks up a new videogame, he or she knows very little about the game. He or she knows little about the world the game operates in, the rules of the world, the rules of his or her character, or the rules of the interaction of his or her character with that world. The child doesn’t know what problems they have to solve to advance through the world, and in many cases the child doesn’t even know how to solve those problems ahead of time!

Yet, to win (and that is the goal of most videogames), he or she must learn those rules, master those rules, learn the problems, solve the problems, and fail a hundred times before finally succeeding!

Imagine a system so ingeniously designed, so pedagogically efficient that it takes a child from beginner to master in 40 to 60 hours (the standard amount of time a game plays), forces them to fail dozens of times before achieving ultimate success, but is so inspiring and so engaging that they solve the problems on their own, actively ask friends for help, and even do research to find answers.

Content Matters

Now imagine that what they’ve mastered, what they’re curious about, what they ask for help on, and ultimately what they succeed in is not Super Mario Brothers … but Algebra …

Now – if you were asked to design a system of education, wouldn’t that result be your goal? If you were an administrator or a principal and you were asked to manage a system of education, wouldn’t you be hoping that was the behavior of your students? And if you were a teacher, wouldn’t you be begging for the tools to help that become not just a dream, but a reality?

Of course! We all would! So as educators, we actually owe it to ourselves and to our students not to be frustrated by the videogame medium, not to be afraid of the technology, not to be suspicious of the engagement factor, but actually to embrace it and to ask the critical question “Why?”

In the next post we explore the question of why this works.

A Note from the Author:
This is the first in a series of discussions around the idea of educational gaming, simulations, and immersive learning. It’s a small snippet meant to start a dialogue. I’ll try to keep the piece short so we can dialogue together – so please, any questions, answers, retorts, replies – please post. More than happy to hear them and respond.

About Tabula Digita:
Tabula Digita is the award winning publisher of the DimensionM series of educational videogame titles. DimensionM titles encompass action and non-action titles and allow students to play other students within classrooms, across schools, and across the country, all while learning and increasing achievement. View Tabula Digita titles at www.DimensionM.com

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FETC 2008 starts tomorrow and I'm looking forward to catching up with friends and colleagues from across the Education Technology industry.

I'm participating in a panel discussion on Thursday afternoon about games and education that will balance practitioners with vendors in a discussion about the state of games and learning. From the practitioner side John Rice of the Education Games Research Blog will be there along with Gary Weidenhamer, Education Technology Manager at Palm Beach County District. Dave Martz from Muzzy Lane Software and I will be speaking from the business perspective and Karen Billings from SIIA's Education Division will be moderating.

The panel runs from 1:50-2:45 PM Thursday in room CS4. Hope to see you there!

PS - Check the on-site notices - the room may change.

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Will a middle school video game to teach ethics using a story line out of zombie movies and Frankenstein work? Doug Thomas at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication is working on “Modern Prometheus” a game that involves plagues, body parts, and building a better monster.

My hat is off to the Professor and his team but I question how much real life ethics they are going to teach. One of the fundamental challenges we face in creating serious games is the balance of fantasy vs. reality. Deciding whether or not to dig up graves for body parts just isn’t something your average middle schooler is going to be faced with on a regular basis. On other hand - being nice to the new kid or saying goodbye to a friend who is using drugs are very real.

It also surfaces one of the more vexing issues the entire game industry is facing - how do we move away from guns and gore and yet maintain fun game play? Mainstream gaming sites are full of lamentations about how staid and formulaic most games are today (despite fascinating new entrants like “Portal” from Valve - crazy fun and mind bending at the same time).

In the world of edugames a range of solutions to this challenge is emerging. At one end of the spectrum you have titles like Modern Prometheus and DimensionM from Tabula Digita which use themes involving shooting and gore that are close to mainstream games. [UPDATE: I should have been clearer in my writing here. Tabula Digita's products do not involve gore. They do have some shooting, although this is not the focus of the game and is directed at inanimate objects. Look for their thoughts on this question here soon.] The argument in favor of this approach is that it is familiar to the students. This should make adoption easier and make it more engaging.

The problem with this approach is that for good reasons most schools have strict rules about violence and its depiction on campus. The similarity in educator’s minds to more violent and socially unredeeming games could stall adoption at the school door.

At the other end of the spectrum we have games like Food Force from the UN and River City from Harvard School of Education which attempt to model real life scenarios using video game technologies. While interesting these games can feel a bit stilted at times.

I was encouraged to see that the USC team is allied with Sasha Barab’s Quest Atlantis project because they are taking the middle road. A fantasy world for sure - but one that doesn’t rely on violence to engage the learner.

In the end, success for edugames will depend on sound game play. If you are not familiar with Raph Koster’s work on this topic I encourage you to read his book A Theory Of Fun and his blog. Raph and the group of thinkers he is a part of talk about game play “atoms” and other essential concepts that should allow us to take instructional content and build games that are insanely fun to play.

You should also play as many games as you can (work work work..). Knowing the canon and the vocabulary (visual, linguistic, social, and competitive) of modern games is an essential grounding for helping us all take this concept to the next level. Get in touch if you want some suggestions on where to start.

We have to find some new environments and themes to ground edugames in - shooting and flinging body parts around isn’t going to cut it except in Forensics 101.

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Technology & Learning On-Line has launched a set of forums on education technology issues. For some odd reason they selected me to moderate the Games and Virtual Worlds Forum. As the graphic shows teaching and learning is about a conversation, so lets get one going over there.

MaestroC got the ball rolling by stating that Second Life is the best platform and that games for education are a fad. Agree, disagree, keep it polite and lets all learn together. See my response on the forum and ad your own!

There is also a quick poll on which kind of game player you are. Several years ago Richard Bartle articulated the four primary styles of game play and a theory about how to balance them. Take the poll and see where you fit with your peers.

Other forums include:

• Student Personal Gadgets
• Free Stuff
• Security
• Digital Storytelling
• Letters to the Editor

  Credit to Jessica Hagy over at Indexed for the graphic.

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Welcome Technology & Learning readers. My article Getting It Wrong - Slaying Myths About Video Games covers 5 misconceptions many teachers about video games and was published in two parts in September and October.

If you are interested in learning more in on the topic of games in the classroom here are two resources to help you.

John Rice's Education Games Research is essential reading on the subject. John is a Technology Director for a School District here in Texas and has published research in this arena. He writes from a practitioner's perspective but also with a good eye for research validation.

Richard Carey has put together an excellent resource over at Squidoo which provides automatically updated links and resources on the topic of Serious Games, Simulations & Learning. You can find books, blogs, and other items of interest at the site.

I also write regulary here on this topic and you can find all the relevant articles by clicking on the Serious Games link in the sidebar.

On a less serious note you can also read John August's Seven Things I Learned from World of Warcraft.

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Do video games belong in the classroom?

Part 2 of the article I wrote for Technology & Learning Magazine is up on their website now.

The myths covered this month are:

Myth #3—Learning elements leach all the fun out of games
Myth #4—Teachers don't need to be involved in the game; kids can do it on their own
Myth #5—There isn't any scientifically based research to support the use of video games for learning

The lede:

"Do video games and simulations really belong in the classroom? A growing body of evidence—from education conference sessions to ramped-up gaming research and university pilot programs—all point to the affirmative. However, sensationalized press accounts, a personal lack of familiarity with games, and other factors still contribute to a broad skepticism of their value by educators, parents, and the public. Last month, we addressed the first two of five commonly held myths about video games. Here, we examine the remaining three."

Part 1 from last month is here. The myths debunked were:

Myth #1—Games are all about twitch speed, not higher order thinking skills
Myth #2—Games are just about violence and sex

Enjoy - then come back here and add your thoughts or tell me what I got wrong in comments!

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Teaching metaphors, the role of school in society, bad (i.e. wrong) press for video games, glitz vs. content, banned books, racism in games, phishing games, and monkeys at the keyboard. All featured on this weeks roundup!

Teachings of a Zen Gardener over at PickTheBrain is a beautiful analogy for what teachers do.

The always excellent Will Richardson posted “School as Node” over at Weblogg-Ed. The original post he references talked about revolution but Will argues that we need to engage in a conscious act of evolution. This is a nice follow on to the articles just published here by Paul Schumann.

Unconscionable. Really. Newspaper Seriously Errs Reporting Videogame Study at Educational Games Research. We deserve a better press than this - oh wait we have the web now.

Logic+Emotion published When Presentation Eclipses Story. Textbook publishers are on the horns of a dilemma here - pretty covers and whizzy free-with-order stuff sells books - but at the heart of it we should remember that it is about kids understanding the content. Its also a good reminder for anyone doing a presentation.

Sad but true. Starting to notice - the only people school firewalls keep away from resources are the teachers - students know of every proxy on the planet - from the Classroom 2.0 blog. Related to my entry Disfunction Junction

Love this list - Banned Books: Have you read one? from Clarksville, TN Online. I'm a piker - I've only read 18 of them. But this gives me some ideas..

On the edugaming front at the The Forge · Straight From Central Casting is a disturbing reflection on the role of racism when creating "the bad guys" in game design. Think this doesn't matter for the real world? Head over to DailyKos to read a hilarious send up of anti-muslim stereotyping.

Play this game! Over at PC World Phishing Game Warns Users highlights a great educational game that everyone should play. I consider myself fairly savvy and I only got about 75% right the first time through.

Hat tip to Paul Schumann - this is a really cool video of a crowd game using technology. Look at the intensity - we want that in our classrooms!

Must see video - Chimp vs. Pacman.

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Interesting links on education publishing, education technology, and virtual worlds in education.

Research shows schools that fund Libraries have higher scores. Annie Teich at Crazy for Kids Books talks about some work that AASL is doing to shed light on this. I'm surprised this research hasn't been done before.

Student blogger censored by Judge for disparaging administrators. Everyone agrees that the student used unfortunate language on her personal blog to describe school officials, but the Judge sided with the school in abrogating her free speech rights. This one will get appealed. See my article on the disconnect between new technology and schools.

Effects of videogames on spatial learning and awareness are long lasting (and even between the genders). Commercial Gaming guro Damien Schubert comments on some fascinating early results from research in this area.

Google gets into virtual worlds? Raph Koster and others are reporting that it looks like Google is partnering with ASU on a virtual world build on top of Google Earth. Does this have anything to do with James Gee moving down there recently?

Teachers excited about learning due to new technologies! Carolyn Foote at the excellent Not So Distant Future blog talks about how excited she and her peers are about learning and collaborating internationally and muses about how we can share that with the students. (Disclosure - my son attends her school).

Serious Games are not just for kids. John Rice over at Educational Games Research does a nice roundup of some of the recent news around Seniors and videogames. The cognitive benefits apply to all ages!

We need teachers more than ever with new technologies. I agree. There will be more on this in part 2 of my article in Technology & Learning.

Update on game engines for Education. Richard Carey does a nice job of updating his reporting on this critical topic.

The perfect marketing plan. Solid advice on making marketing plans mean something from John Jantsch at Duck Tape Marketing.

Hi-larious IBM video from the '60's about home shopping. Oh well - they did the best they could. They did see the basics - they just had no way to imagine the real breakthroughs and the many ways that society itself would change.

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My article busting myths about video games and learning is on Technology & Learning's website now - you can find it here. The prior link was to the flash version of the whole magazine.

Many many many thanks to Jo-Ann McDevitt who encouraged this and especially to Susan McLester who was a great teacher and editor on this project. Give T+L some love - go read the whole thing there.

Here is a teaser from the lead -

"...When you look past the Orcs, Gnomes, and other fanciful inhabitants and elements, you find Blizzard has built an elegant and engaging learning management system. WoW does an outstanding job of guiding players to their zone of proximal development and provides a neverending stream of feedback and fresh challenges while leaving the player in charge. My guess is that philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget would be proud and amused to see his ideas implemented in this context and on such a global scale."

If you want to see the Flash version of the whole magazine it is here. The article starts on page 16.

As always - come back and tell me what I missed!

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Technology & Learning published the first part of my article on myths about games in the classroom today. [updated to connect to the non-flash version]

This is a two part series. In next month's issue I look at three more myths and suggest some paths forward for those who are interested.

It got a nice review on John Rice's Educational Games Blog.

As a side note it was kind of cool to see my WoW character on the opening page. If my sons hadn't been at camp when I wrote it we would have had all three of us together.

Go read it - then come back here and tell me what I got wrong!

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Second Life in Education is a hot topic. In that vein EdNet had a strong panel that included folks from SRI, a Teacher who has been using it extensively in her school, and a representative from Second Life. This is the first of three articles on this presentation.

First off, I find it interesting that Second Life is getting most of the visibility in Education when other virtual worlds (Habbo Hotel, Whyville, etc.) are doing far more with K12 age kids and some have more intentionally educational content on them. Chalk it up to Second Life being a media darling and to good outreach from their Education team. If you are interested in this arena some of these other worlds merit a look.

SRI - An R&D Perspective

John Brecht from the Center for Technology in Learning (CTL) at SRI kicked things off. He talked about Lakamaka, a project that focused on language learning in context. In Lakamaka the narrative thread is built around travel - you need to check into hotels, order meals, etc. They have a developed voice recognition engine which allows players to practice their language skills without access to native speakers.

He then shared the lessons learned from this project. They are:

Second Life is a big investment, but not where you think it will be. The software itself is free and content is inexpensive. It is expensive to train teachers how to use the new tools and it requires a high end machines (this alone is enough to give many schools a pause).

Focus on the interactivity aspects - that is where the power lies. It is a great tool for collaborative interactivity, immersion, visualization, and simulation.

Don’t make 3D PowerPoint sites. This isn’t a good environment for virtual lectures, it isn’t great for media delivery (even with high end machines), and chat is better in RL (real life).

Integrate it into existing practice. It isn’t going to replace what works well, so spend the time to figure out how it can compliment the learning ecosystem.

He also listed the challenges of working with Second Life. There isn’t a plug in architecture (its coming), security for teens may be an issue since everything runs on Linden’s servers, and it is relatively high maintenance since Linden does weekly updates.

Brecht also mentioned some worthy alternatives to consider if you are doing development work in this area including Croquet , Sun's Wonderland , Multiverse, and private worlds from Sony and Microsoft. He might have added Muzzy Lane and Numedeon’s NICE to this list as well (both of which were specifically built for educational use).

Tomorrow - Ramapo Middle School - A Practitioner’s View

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On-line games and virtual worlds were the theme at this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC). This is the third of a few roundup articles about the conference with a focus on topics of interest to education and education publishers.

The parallels between how the web is changing the game industry and the world of education publishing are fascinating. Because of the inherent lag in the education market we can learn a lot from how gaming companies are adapting to the web’s incursion into their business.

Raph Koster - Designing for Everywhere

Raph, President of Areae, started by pointing out that 7 of the 8 largest MMOs are web based, not CD-ROM based, and that they have millions of monthly users. His message to the game developers was that by their standards the web based MMOs have horrible interfaces and very low production values. Game developers need to break out of their paradigms and start thinking of games that can be separated from their interface and design and still be compelling. Water dripping from your sword in foggy moonlight is cool, but it isn’t the game. Can you play on a phone? Can you play it on your TV? Could you play it on paper? Can you interface to the game from your GPS? The customers are already going there, better follow!

For publishers this has some interesting parallels. Textbooks in particular have become highly focused on their covers and the free-with-order stuff that wraps around them. Publishers rightly take a great deal of pride the production quality of the products including the instructional design. But, in the age of the web that production quality isn’t nearly as important as it used to be.

One could argue that the most successful textbook product today is Wikipedia which gets 7 billion page views per month for a two color interface. In this view of learning the impact of textbooks is a rounding error.

This was a sobering reminder of how much the web changes the game even for industries that we tend to think of as cutting edge. It will only be more disruptive to industries that are unused to rapid change.

I’m gong to write a deeper and long post on Raph’s design ideas in the next couple of weeks.

Denis Dyack - The Medium is the Message

Dyack, President of Silicon Knights publishers of Too Human, Metal Gear Solid, and Eternal Darkness was an excellent late addition to the agenda.

One of the more interesting ideas (among many) that he shared is that Video Games are the 8th Art Form. This concept grew out of early film theory - Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) called cinema the 7th art form when it blended the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, painting) with the temporal arts (music, poetry, dance). Dyack’s thesis is that with the addition of interactivity video games have created an 8th art form.

Because it is so new we are still finding our way with it, for example learning to write stories for video games is still in its infancy - we really don’t know how to do it well yet.

For education this presents some interesting challenges. A good game requires a narrative thread (even Pac Man had this) but we rarely build education products around a story. Its all about standards and pedagogy and correlations and if we add something to it we tend to focus on adding images and design elements.
What is puzzling about this is that education at its root is passing on access to our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is nothing more than the story of man’s messy tragicomic progress.

One of the most interesting histories I’ve ever read was George Stewart’s “Names on the Land” published in 1945 which tells the story of American History through the prism of how and why we named places.

As one reviewer on Amazon put it:

"I myself half-expected this book to be organized by state, perhaps in alphabetical order. This is not the case. Stewart has organized his data by THEMES in naming, and how these themes have emerged in our history. Therefore, the book (very roughly) follows our history chronologically, as various naming trends have come and gone, in the context of various cultural waves. This pattern tends to approximately follow the "peopling" of the continent (by descendants of Europeans) from east to west."

Sulka Haro - Fostering Open-Ended Play: Unleashing the Creative Community

Sulka Haro, one of the founders of Habbo Hotel was the keynote on the second day. Habbo has been around since 2000. Today they have 7.5 million unique players per month and their largest demographic is 13-16 years with a 51%/49% split between boys and girls. Their user base puts them in the same league as World of Warcraft (see Koster’s point above) but they have done this with an unconventional model.

In Habbo users create a character and get a room they can decorate. Haro described their business as giving users tools and space with the confidence that something will happen. Access is free but users buy “products” like furniture to decorate their rooms through micro-transactions. This might not look like much - but they have built at $50 million business around it.

They believe there are a couple of reasons they appeal to the 13-16 year old demographic - and these are highly relevant for education publishers.

1. Kids at this age are developing their identities and starting to engage much more with the social aspects of life. Today’s 14 year olds were born in 1994, after the web came out. An environment like this feels natural to them. If you are building products for this group a web based component is expected and they are sophisticated consumers of on-line resources so you’d be well served to get it right.

2. The site is really about open play - something that kids this age still remember how to do but lack the social permission to do in real life. Habbo provides an outlet for this. One example he gave is that someone built their room into a McDonalds and kids will go and “play” a minimum wage job for a couple of hours at a time.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of their model is that the content scales with the user base. Haro’s formula was f(players)=f(content) because as the players create content the content scales to the size of the community. He dislikes the phrase “user generated content” (UGC) and prefers “player created activity” which actually describes it in a way a player might (not a publisher).

This talk was relevant for showing a very real alternative business model and a model of a user driven virtual world that is extremely successful with teenagers. To Koster’s point about interface and UI - if you looked at Habbo from a traditional gamer perspective it looks simplistic and even ugly. Yet more kids are "playing" it every month than any video game available (WoW has all ages).

What could publishers do with their vast backlists if they could atomize them and make them available through microtransactions in a virtual world - allowing kids and/or teachers to build their own learning libraries?

Other articles in this series:

Morhaime From Blizzard

Nurturing Influencers for Education Products

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The panel on Managing Influencers at the Austin Game Developers Conference yesterday got me thinking about a frequently ignored aspect of the K12 publishing world - building and nurturing communities of key influencers around education products.

In education influencers are the people who speak at regional trade shows, who write blogs and podcasts, who participate in on-line forums, and who serve on state and national committees. We often rely on our Sales Reps and the Curriculum Consultants to handle this aspect of the business. But managing influencers is very different than maitaining good relationships with key customers and it is fundamentally a post sales responsibility.

"Managing key customers" is a transactional view - it is about the next sale. Reps will tell you that relationships are the key - and they are - but they are based on transactions. Influencers want a different kind of recognition - they want to be respected for their ideas not for their wallets. This means they need a different approach. As one of the speakers put it - "Marketing brings customers in - Community Management keeps them there."

What lessons from the on-line Community Managers in the game world could we benefit from in education?

1. Assign influencer management to customer support not marketing or sales.
2. Treat this as a high level hire not entry level. The people managing influencers need to be able to go toe to toe with them. Ex- Principals, Lead Teachers, Department Chairs would all be good candidates.
3. Make sure the program is tightly in sync with Customer Support and Marketing - no surprises either way should be the mantra. When things go wrong you want your Community Managers to be able to quickly tap the influencers for feedback.
4. Listen more than you talk to them. And when you do talk make sure it is a conversation not a sales pitch.
5. Don't over use them - you can burn influencers out by bombarding them with information and requests.
6. Support their credibility - don't ask them to only talk about your products or only say good things about them.

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Mike Morhaime, President & Co-Founder of Blizzard Entertainment kicked off the Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC) this morning. Blizzard produces the wildly successful World of Warcraft on-line multiplayer behemouth (9 million+ players worldwide). AGDC is focusing on on-line games this year and a packed auditorium was eager to pick up some pearls of wisdom from the industry leader.

Blizzard matters to education because when you strip away the Orcs and Elves under the hood they have built an extremely elegant learning management system. As the undisputed world wide leader in the MMO space we have a lot to learn from their approach to building products and structuring their business.

Morhaime started by taking us over some familiar ground - the extreme rate of change we are living through and how it is difficult for us to see it from the midst of it. For example, in 1991 it took 9 hours to fly from Los Angeles to Paris. If airlines had kept pace with the rate of improvement in computer speeds it would now take 2 minutes.

My surprise of the morning came when he revealed how Blizzard has deep roots in the Education Technology space. They were founded in 1991 by three recent UCLA Engineering Grads with 2 PCs in an apartment. In 1993 they were purchased by Davidson and Associates. Through various corporate mergers they are now part of Vivendi.

One has to wonder if some of the lessons from ed tech about neurscience and learning rubbed off on the game guys - after all the first task a successful game has to master is teaching the user how to play the game. Without this it becomes an excercise in frustration - i.e. a bomb of a game. It is an economic imperitive that they get this right. Hence the elegant learning management system underlying the whole game.

From there he walked us through a series of solid business advice from a hugely successful company. There wasn't anything earth shattering, but then success is usually built on solid execution of some great ideas. In order they are:

1. Gameplay first

Their first priority is always to make great games. If they don’t get this right none of the rest of it matters. The game market is like a donut - in the center are the core markets (hard core players, opinion makers) but the casual markets are the much bigger ring. The combination is success not one or the other. They try to build games that are deep and replayable while still accessable.

Another way to put this is that game should be easy to learn, difficult to master. As an example he cited Guitar Hero. Anyone can get into it quickly.

2. Build and Protect the Brand

They want to be seen as high quality - with fun and polish One way to test this goal is to have a player see an unknown game from Blizzard and they buy it because they trust the brand so much.

They strive to only make “brand deposits” only - not “brand withdrawels.” This drives promo plans, fees (value equation).

3. Resist the pressure to ship early

You only have one chance to make a first impression.

Think long term - don’t mortgage the future to meet the quarter. In 1996 when they were working on Diablo - they were shooting for xMas. Instead they released it on Dec 31st. It sold well through the whole following year. No one looks back and says “of only they had released it 3 weeks earlier”. Players love it but if it had gone out early they would only think about it as a buggy game.

4. Resist the pressure to do everything at once

Don’t let the distractors pull you away from what is important. Build on your successes, gain expertise, then get more ambitious. If you try to do everything at once you risk actually goes up.

5. Estimating Demand is always a challenge.

WoW was their first on-line subscription based game. Their launch night was off the charts and they realized they needed more hardware immediately. Several times in the first year they had to stop retail distribution because they didn’t have capacity to support new users.

When they launched the latest release to WoW they overestimated but the system held up to 2.1 million units moving in the first blush of the release.

6. HR is Really Important

They went from 250 employees (estimate from the chart) to 3,000 between 2003 and 2007. As business exploded they had to scale across the entire business - every function. They could not have done it without putting a solid HR team in place. He didn't mention it, but this is the kind of advantage you can get from being part of a major corporation - this type of expertise and the systems needed to support it can be quickly grafted on.

7. Running a MMORPG is not just game development.

You need 24/7 IT, community management, and global services. Everything that impacts a players experience are as important as the game play itself. They became a service company.

8. Communicate - or people will make stuff up.

They found they needed formal processes to keep the community and international divisions informed - particularly during fire drills. This involved things like formalized email lists to push information and a layer of people who were around the development team to keep internal info flowing. Another example is a process for dealing with problems when they didn’t know when it can be fixed (e.g. check back in an hour).

9. Avoid financial incentives

If there is a financial reward - a lot of people will go out and do it. Gold farming, account stealing, credit card fraud. This has bad implications for the wider group of players who just want to play the game. They do whatever they can to minimize the financial rewards but it is a constant battle. The believe it is important that they fight this behavior to protect their players.

10 Testing - never trust version 1.0

Everyone at the company tests, then they do a public beta. In the public beta you find out from more about load balancing. More importantly you uncover exploits or what they call "cheese" - a most efficient path that gets you game rewards faster even if isn’t fun. People will do it if it is there - which will rub off on the game negatively. They strive to loop back to number one - gameplay matters.

He also spent a fair amount of time talking about how they have evolved as a global corporation. They now get more than half their subscribers from Asia and when they released the Burning Crusade they did it in a series of midnight releases rolling around the globe. In the old days (the 90's) they would release it in the US and then some time later do translations and release it overseas.

As education goes more and more global this has interesting implications for our business. It will clearly move much more closely than it will in the gaming world. But you just have to listen to Marjorie Scardino of Pearson talk about China to get a sense of how it is coming at us and quickly.

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Virtual Worlds and Video Games for Education are getting a lot of press these days. With all the hoopla it helps to bring a little perspective to where we are in the development of this new market. It is feeling a lot like the web in 1997 and perhaps we can take some lessons from that era to help us make sense of today’s emerging opportunities.

Nick Wilson over at Metaversed did an excellent piece titled 7 Reasons Why Virtual Worlds are Like the Web Circa 1997. In this post is I delve a little deeper into his list as it relates specifically to education and the companies that serve this market.

Here is Silver’s premise:

The reality is that the 3D web is in its infancy...those people trying to make the best of the kludgy communications systems, poor system stability and all the other oddities that arise from using a system that's in constant development are at the forefront of something that will eventually change the way we all live and work on the internet.

That doesn't stop it feeling like some kind of insane time warp though. With that in mind, here's a fun, but true list of reasons why what we're doing in virtual worlds today is like what we did 10yrs ago.

He talks about the seven points for the broad general market, here are my expansions on his ideas for Education.

1. Return of the Walled Garden - No one wants to return to the browser wars, but in education there are valid reasons for creating walled gardens, children’s on-line safety being the leading one. There are also valid pedagogical reasons why a District or Classroom might want to restrict membership in a virtual world to their students. While this may be a negative in the consumer space it frequently is an advantage in educational spaces.

2. Clueless Corporations - In the late '90s there were a slew of education internet sites that were total disasters because people rushed in who didn’t understand either the web or the classroom. You could tell who they were because they oozed arrogance all over the table.

There are some enduring sites that emerged from this era and the common thread seems to be a basic economic model that doesn't rely on advertising and a focus on supporting teachers. Those sites that were going to spam the classroom with ads or who were going to rely on the students who “got it” to do their marketing failed. Often miserably and publicly.

3. Spinning Logos - Lots of people are building out education spaces in Second Life with no plan to actually build a community. A flashy building and cool amphitheater can’t overcome a lack of depth (or scalability). One of the most successful education sites around - Whyville - which has attracted 2.5 million kids since 1999 has a very simple interface based on older technologies. They succeed because they consciously put a great deal of effort into community building.

4. First Fever - Unlike the larger market where companies are piling into Second Life in education market investors burned last time are hesitant to make a bet today. They now believe the education market is the equivalent of lighting cigars with $100 bills.

But there is a real first mover advantage in education which can lower the investment risk profile. Education markets take longer to build, but once they do they are a far stabler annuity stream than the fickle consumer space. When teachers embed activities in their lesson plans and get good results the switching costs go up considerably, hence the first mover advantage.

5. Rock Star Designers - Many education companies know that they lack the expertise and processes to move aggressively in these spaces. As a result they are looking to outsiders to help them move quickly. The mistake they make is assuming that the new products somehow require a new approach to product launches and diffusion. Hire the rock stars to build the environments, but make sure they are guided by education expertise from internal staff and consultants. For education the overriding theme should be how these efforts fit in to existing practice, otherwise it becomes too much work for the average teacher.

6. If You Spam It, They Will Come - Silvers focuses on search noting that “its very easy to find stuff, but not very easy to find good stuff.” For education the key links have to be to the education standards. No one outside of a university setting has done a good job of tightly integrating standards and making it easy for teachers to see this and report on it. Right now the attitude seems to be “just throw some stuff up there” and we’ll see what happens. An intentional approach will win the day here.

7. Selling Picks and Shovels - The big winners last time were those who sold the tools. For educational virtual worlds the toolsets are changing quickly and reducing the cost of entry. There are several that can be used for educational tools and Richard Carey has done a nice job of explaining the differences. For those who want to play in this space the cost of getting your prototype done and in the hands of educators has come down considerably in just the past few months.

However the tool companies were not the biggest winners - the “content” providers (Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc.) are where the serious money got made. For education this means finding a way to expand and amplify the core content areas. The virtual worlds that can do that in engaging and sustainable ways will be home runs.

This is a very exciting time to be involved in this arena - there is a great positive energy and a sense that we are on the cusp of building some powerful additions to the pool of tools that teachers use in the classroom. If we can learn a few things from the last time we went through this we can help that day arrive sooner and create products with real staying power.

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Collective writing is a critical 21st Century Skill. Wikis are the primary tool for teaching this skill today. What resources exist to help teachers use wikis in the classroom? Recently this issue has been bubbling up on several places.

The Wall Street Journal had an article on the discussions behind the Wikis. For educational purposes there is more meat in the discussion threads for classroom conversation and interesting opportunities for students to engage actively with content than there often is in the articles themselves. Money quote:

"But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't say.

This is where the fun begins. You'd be astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases."

Will Richardson over at Weblogg-Ed followed up on this with a post that talked specifically about what this means for classroom use. His take:

"I keep thinking what a necessary part of the writing process this type of negotiation is going to be as we collaborate more and more on wikis and documents and videos and whatever else. When I ask teachers whether their students are writing employing truly collaborative practices (not simply “cooperative”) and whether they are writing either alone or together in hypertext environments (which I also believe is a part of writing literacy these days), blank stares usually ensue.

Teaching Wikipedia gives us the opportunity to do both, especially if we tune into those back channel conversations."

Lest you think this only applies to existing classroom content there are some folks working to integrate Wikis with Virtual Worlds so that you can have a parallel discussion/construction while experiencing the world. John Rice over at the Educational Games Blog notes:

"a wiki, can be combined with commercial gaming content. The possibilities seem very interesting. A professor can assign students tasks in a MMO, and the students can team up on producing a document in a wiki at the same time they are engaged in the MMO."

But it isn't all roses. Wikis can be gamed by those with an ideological or political angle. It was recently discovered that the CIA and voting maching manufacturer Diebold were editing entries. Even Fox News was unbalancing things by editing articles to make themselves look better and opponents look worse.

But of course that goes back to the Journal's point - the discussion threads where the knowledge is constructed are some of the most interesting and informative parts of the site. There are also where you would learn about who is editing a piece and what changes have been made over time.

Hmm - I wonder if there is a word for that constructive kind of learning....

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Unpacking the Zeitgeist is an amusing post about World of Warcraft (WoW). In it Sci Fi Author Charlie Stross attempts to explain to someone from 1977 how Gnomes dropped from the sky in the shape of a URL advertisement in WoW. He unpacks 30 years of assumed knowledge (what is the internet, what is a PC, why do people play games dressed up as furry animals?). As Raph Koster noted this represents pre-traumatic stress disorder as we contemplate what this means for 2037.

Think of the ingenuity and focus it took to pull this stunt off. The intellect behind it is creative, transgressive, technical, and funny - all at the same time! Where are we teaching these skills in today's classrooms? Talk about your 21st Century Skills.

As a side note I happened to be wandering through Ironforge that day on my toon (Embir - Level 70 Mage on Stonemaul). I was stumped when I happened upon the neat piles of gnomes in front of the bank. It was only later that I realized what I'd seen.

If none of this makes any sense to you I highly recommend that you engage with games and gamers. Blizzard announced today that over 9 million people worldwide are now active subscribers to World of Warcraft. A whole culture has emerged around these gaming communities. Tapping the elements of that culture that tap into 21st Century Skills - and there are a lot of them - would make a huge difference in schools. (This will be the subject of a later post.)

But it can't be learned by reading about it - GO PLAY!

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The Games Learning & Society Conference (GLS) kicked off this morning in Madison WI with a packed breakfast sessionat 8 AM.

The conference has about 350 attendees and is an interesting mix of academics, teachers, and some business types. The agenda is so rich that it choosing sessions is agonizing.

James Paul Gee gave a great summary of the state of things as we munched on bacon and looked out over Lake Monona. He reminded us of the gaps that exist between kids experiences with games and their experience of school. One of his main points was that literacy is far more than phonics and decoding. The real challenge is helping kids master the complex academic language they need to succeed in Middle an High School. Young kids have no problem navigitating rich complicated technical text as they play today's games. He got a good laugh by reading instructions from the back of a Yu-gi-oh card. These same students are not challenged in the same way at school. The money quote:

"The dirty capitalists trust our children more than the schools to learn complex language."

He also did a great job of reviewing the differences in how learning is viewd in gaming culture and in school culture. Some of the major points here were:

* Performance before competence - kids don't read manuals they just jump in and do it. This gives context when they do go look at the reference materials. This is the opposite of how schools approach it.

* Gamers embrace failure. They know they need to fail early and frequently to learn, and they embrace it rather than holding back.

* Gamers love to transgress. When a player transgresses the rules it proves that they have internalized them. Schools punish this behavior, games reward it.

* Gamers don't look at eye candy. To play a game well you have to look past the eye candy and grok the deep underlying model. This is same way Scientists see the world, they look past the pretty surface to see what system underlies things. Compare this with the role of flashy graphics in today's textbooks.

* Gamers value information as a guide to action not a collection of truths. What Gee calls a Design Mode of information - how can it use it - underlies gaming culture. Schools are far more about Belief Mode - who said it, is it true. The problem today is that information is coming at us so fast that belief mode only isn't practical. We need to filter information based on how it can help us accomplish things.

* Collaboration is non-heirarchical. n3wbs and experts mingle seamlessly in the social networks around games. Tacit knowledge is valued. There are many routes to participation and status where schools have limited routes. Leadership is also highly porous.

It was a great talk and a good way open the next couple of days. More to follow.

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The first mutliplayer game tournament for education is being held. The event is being put on by Tabula Digita at ISTE in Atlanta (the show formerly known as NECC). A large crowd has gathered in the atrium above the exhibit floor to watch the final round.

This is a major step in the world of educational gaming. NT Etuk, the President of Tabula Digita, just said that this is really about the students. It is about meeting them where they are - kids living in a gaming world bringing the skills and abilities that go with that to their work as learners. Students have come from as far away as New York, California, and Oregon to compete today.

A new generation of educational games is reaching the market that is multiplayer, on-line, and richly three dimensional. Tabula Digita has the pole position in this emergent market and they are putting on a great show for the educators gathered to watch. The contest will pit teams of students against each other in game of using math skills to navigate and solve problems in an on-line world.

Gaming tournaments have gone mainstream as this 60 Minutes segment showed last year. While the prizes here today are not the megabucks found in commercial game tournaments the contestents will vie in three separate games for title of top educational gamer. The winner takes home an iBook laptop.

Years from now we will look back on this as an inflection point in the use of on-line virtual worlds in learning. I may have to eat my hat on this, but I believe a few short years from now events like this will surpass the Math Olympiad.

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Ren Reynolds over at Terra Novahas a good post today with a budding discussion thread about how the Virtual World industry should put together some agreed upon policies and procedures for children’s’ on-line safety.

For this to work sites need a combination of technical and behavioral approaches.

More below the fold...

Continue reading "Virtual World Standards for Children’s Safety" »

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A new alternate reality game (ARG) launched recently to explore what an oil shock would look like. World With Oil is the game and it is incorporating all of the social media found on the web in this massively multiplayer experience.

The coolest part - it is only 4 days old and they already have resources for the classroom. Talk about the power of social media for learning.

Sign up and join in to learn what it is all about.

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