Online Gamers & the Development of 21st Century Skills — Lisa Galarneau (digital anthropologist)

has moments where she realizes we're actually living in the future
interest is in spontaneous communities of learning
- ongoing ethnographic research in City of Heroes/City of Villains
- fieldwork in New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and the US
- survey of almost 10,000 games regarding social dynamics, knowledge sharing, skills development, etc. (advertised on the launch page of the game)

the future seldom looks like we expect it to, is often imagined within existing paradigms
favorite example is large, spacious, impressive, grand airports with nowhere to plug in your laptop
we're building our new classrooms on the same paradigms
hints about the future often come from surprising corners
look in pop culture, subculture, early adoption

OECD Five Key Competencies for Life and Learning
- managing self
- relating to others
- thinking
- participating and contributing
- using language symbols and text

how we shift from a content-orientation of learning to this

21st century skills
- emotional intelligence
- soft skills
- enterprise skills
- etc.

her interest is in how do people learn these skills spontaneously
play is to the 21st century what steam was to the 20th century
games have always been primarily social
when it wasn't, it was a technical limitation

characteristics of online games/virtual worlds (MUDs, Moos, MUSHes, MMORPGs, MMOGs, MMOs, MMIs, social worlds like Second Life and There, synthetic worlds and metaverses)
- persistence (the world exists whether you are there or not)
- freedom/open-ended
- characters/avatars
- giulds/clans/teams
- cooperative and competitive play
- economies/virtual property (sometimes)

complex social systems
robust economies

survey of 10,000 online gamers
- hardcore female players play more hours - 52% have 11 or more characters
- female players more likely to leverage social networks for knowledge sharing
- male players more likely to approach strangers for help

- older players more likely to help other players
- age was a perfect bell curve
- younger players more likely to play solo, grief
- some older players use game to relieve grief, fill time during retirement/disability
- some younger players use game to develop social skills

who the heck are these people?
open box question so she got everything from adult porn star to CEO
all different socio-economic levels

Christopher Dede's critical skills
- thrive on chaos
- comfort with diversity
- manage information

Project New Media Literacy (MIT)
- play
- performance
- etc.

mashed up: thriving on chaos, managing self, relating to others, language, symbols, text, multi-tasking, negotiation, networking, distributed cognition, performance, play, collective intelligence, etc. (City of Heroes raid as example of working together, reading data on screen, etc.)

comfort with diversity, participatory/contributing, performance, negotiation, networking, etc. (City of Heroes example of player who didn't speak English)

managing information, thinking, participating/contributing, using language, symbols, etc. (World of Warcraft as example)

player perceptions of improvements to real life skills:
- patience/helpful attitude
- communication/social skills
- teamwork/cooperation
- sense of humor
- dealing with conflict
- self-control
- etc.

quote from a guy who thought he was a good communicator until 54 people in a guild ignored him for bad behavior so he took some classes to improve his communication

how might online games do for learning?
- will online games/virtual worlds will become mainstream activities and they're something we just do for personal enrichment and development
- will our school systems better acknowledge work done in these spaces?

slides will be at http://www.socialstudygames.com/
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Science Literacy in Virtual Worlds — Constance Steinkuehler

MacArthur grant to study World of Warcraft (50%+ of the market so a huge influence)
2+ year ethnographic study on Lineage I and II
- distributed cognition
- collaborative problem-solving
- literacy practices
- computational literacy
- meaning & values
- scientific reasoning
- etc.

for the last year, looking at 5 core literacy practices - pop cosmopolitanism
- collaborative problem-solving
digital literacy practices
- scientific habits of mind
- computational literacy artifacts
- mechanisms for learning

science - "an accumulation of facts is no more science than a heap of stones is a house," Poincare, 1905
not just accumulation of knowledge, but also processes

AAAS standards for scientific habits of mind as inspiration for their project
502 benchmarks, which were the foundation for national science standards and in turn state science standards

were people doing some forms of scientific reasoning in MMOs?
started with the forums to document this kind of work
the days of plausability for what games could, would, might do are waning, so carefully documenting what and how they are learning now

pulled out 1 of 21 forums for WoW for their full investigation
lots and lots of text devoted to games and fandom communities
analyzed roughly 2000 posts over 85 threads

analytic framework drawn from AAAS standards and then supplemented
- scientific discursive practices (argument and debate around a science literacy)
- model-based reasoning
- tacit epistemology (what kind of stance were they taking towards knowledge?)

from data (focused on proportions):
- is the talk productive? 86% of the discussion on game-related forums is "social knowledge construction" (question, answer, discussion, alternative proposed, debate, resolution - basically problem-solving; she doesn't get that high a number in her classes)
- scientific discursive practices; of the 86%:
- 37% build on others' ideas
- 37% use of counterarguments (debating ideas)
- 28% using data/evidence to support their claims
- 12% alternative explanations of data
- 7% reference outside resources
- model-based reasoning was 10%, half of which are evaluating their models, regardless of how predictive they are
- mathematical computation; mathematize their data to compute numbers for understanding (4%)

showed prototypical post doing all of these things
social knowledge construction --> model-based reasoning --> references outside resources --> model testing/prediction
- amazing mathematical model to support his theory

tacit epistemologies (27% was not codable)
- evaluative = 65% ("I see your point, but I wonder if...," debate is a good thing to develop better theories)
- absolutist = 30% ("whose mom believes that...," there is a truth)
- relativist = 5% ("it's all just opinion anyway," equally fine)

compare to Kuhn's work (1991)
- absolutist = 50%
- relativist = 35%
- evaluative = 15%

chicken-egg problem - were these gamers already disposed towards evaluative or do games move you in this direction (probably somewhere in between)

....compared to schools?
1 in 5 Americans is scientifically literate (Miller, 2004)

standard inquiry activities engender epistemological beliefs contrary to science (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002)
- eg, run the experiment over and over until you get the teacher's answer, which isn't actually science

games as gateway drug
starting to set up small after-school groups
putting pop culture as a drug into scientific reasoning
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Cultural Capital & Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying — David White

presence, embodiment, "emotional bandwidth", informal learning spaces as interests
saw World of Warcraft and noticed many of these things
can't run his university classes in WoW, so trying to take out what's good and use it
showed a 2-minute video of community in WoW

network vs. community
- engage with a network
- structured?
- utilitarian?
- intitutional?
- social?
- egalitarian?
- belong to a community
- trust?
- kudos?
- responsibility?
--> need community to learn

Lobotomy Guild
- practical (collaborative)
- social

cultural capital: forms of knowledge; skill; education; any advantages a person has which give them a higher status in society

social capital: resources based on group membership, relationships, etc.

WoW is great for allowing the exchange of capital
could *see* that capital, explicit capital

Wenger: Communities of Practice
negotiation of meaning
- joint enterprise
- mutual engagement
- shared repertoire

guilds are a community of practice

nexus of multimembership
we are all members of multiple communities of practice

showed a video about "organization" and "social" in WoW

ecology of tools/services (Wenger: Communities of Practice)
community location for player was not just within WoW but also a Yahoo group, Facebook group, and more
social attachment to community goes beyond the game itself

Rhizome model (ginger model) - tendrils in different directions and at different levels but can swell at the right moment
- as opposed to scaffolds
how does this relate to elearning and taking out of WoW what's good?
how much structure should we put in place? especially if you don't want to kill community?

can't do his classes in WoW, so he is trying to implement these things in Second Life
10 musings on the encouragement of communities in MUVEs - google: dave 10 musings and you'll find his blog post

thoughts:
3 P's (important for elearning?):
- presence
- persistence
- peers

community
- seed?
- population
- joint enterprise
- mutual engagement
- shared repertoire

institution as rhizome facilitator
- students show up at a course and there is a lot of scaffolding to get them started; they proceed to spend the semester dismantling it
interweaving socialising and learning. the structured and the free (breadth of activity)
- we're not so good at providing places where people can socialize online in the distance elearning experience
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Doug Thomas, respondent

"learning immersion"
learning about a lot of stuff allows you to emerge into a profession and become something (learn how to be that once you're in it)
in game environments, there's an inversion taking place
how many people read the manual for a web browser? you don't. you learn by doing and you go look it up when you get stuck
you learn by being a web surfer, so you learn by doing/being

have to be careful that we're not talking about transition competencies
when you read the new competencies, they're not based on individual achievement, which is what our education system *is* based on
what if one of the competencies of the 21st century is who to cheat off of?
what if we think of knowledge as continuously in-flux? value transparency and process?
becoming an increasingly large part of society to manage who is tracking you

when we stop learning in a game, we either quit and go to a new game or we start trying to create a new game within the game
- that's kind of what forums are about
what is it about science and gaming that connect?
isomorphism? that gamers are in some ways transgressive in the same ways that science is
neither cares about the status quo
clue in to something organic
drug of learning - as Jim Gee noted, that's what we're addicted to

classrooms are all about preserving the status quo

the big sword in WoW allows you to do certain things but also allows you to open up opportunities for the whole group
radical interdependency
now the guild can do things it couldn't before because you have that sword
competence replaces expertise
what does that mean for the structure of knowledge and learning
what does it mean that everyone has to do their job rather than excel at knowing?

fundamental way knowledge is changing
traditionally taught as something commodified
what games teach you is that this is never the case
knowledge is not a "what" but a when, where, and how

gls2007