Friday, July 23, 2010
Reflections on Readings for 2010/07/23
James Paul Gee's comments ring true to me based on my undergraduate and graduate research experiences. The idea of the doing of the science being a game very much matches my sense of what successful researchers look like. It is all about getting it to work, seeing what you can figure out, determining what you are confident of and what needs more research. There was a very strong ethic in grad school of "Go look it up and keep working." That is, go look up that mathematical technique or that bit of programming or whatever and then apply it to your work to solve the problem you are having at the moment but then get back to work on the actual problem. Other information was used when we needed it and in order to solve a problem and move the work forward. In that sense research is the game. It strikes me that this idea of making education problem based could be highly motivating. That being said, research was also mind numbingly tedious so care should be taken in designing projects, activities, games, etc to fit this game oriented style of instruction. Another consideration is that because of the complexity of designing a good game it may be prohibitive in terms of time to construct lessons this way.
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Kiwi, sometimes I feel like the term "problem-solving" gets overused and misused. It seemed like Gee was almost totally focused on "problem-solving" as the most important thing to be teaching our students. i would suggest that almost as important is to be teaching "decision making". Of course, I don't know exactly how Gee is defining problem solving. But to me it implies gaining a highly detailed level of knowledge around an issue or phenomenon, in order to determine the "forces" at play to a very exact level. I'm not sure that this is truly what video gamers are doing (or what people are generally faced with doing in the non-academic world). Instead, I would argue that decision making is more common, in that one forms a much less complete picture of the issue or phenomenon; weighs the solution options against a number of different factors (scientific, economic, timing, etc.); and makes a decision about which way to go.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting distinction. I'm not sure if I can tell exactly what Gee would think about the difference between problem solving and decision making. With my perspective from the sciences of astronomy and physics it seems like there can be both aspects present. One must problem solve to predict some phenomena (such as the oil spill activity we did in class. How much oil is really leaking? How can it be stopped? What will the environmental effects be?) These questions seem to start out at problem solving and end up at some kind of higher level where the answers are not clear but decision must still be made.
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