Week 5 Reflections

Class this week was interesting. I really enjoyed Dr. Jane McGonigal's talk on how gaming can make the world better. I personally have little interest in gaming, but her enthusiasm was catching. I thought her discussion of why gaming appeals to people (because they feel like they are better or more accomplished in the game than in real life) and her explanation of the positive aspects of gaming (advanced problem solving skills, perseverance, sense of accomplishment...) made a lot of sense. I just have to wonder if if is a good idea to encourage gaming when it already had such a strong hold on so many people. I have a younger brother in high school who spends a lot of time playing World of Warcraft. Last year it got to the point where he was failing multiple classes because he was spending so much time playing WoW and my parents made him stop playing altogether. They let him play again this year and he is managing his time slightly better but it is still all he really wants to do. It just seems like he is withdrawing more and more from the world and that is scary. Even though it would be cool if games started solving real problems, I just don't think I like the thought of people having such much online interactions and so few "real" interactions. Regardless, Dr. McGonigal did give me a new perspective on gaming. A little less helpful was all the time spent classifying the survey questions. Most people (other than the tree people) had very similar ways of classifying the questions. Differences were more due to interpretations of the question, rather than actual classification. Still, it was good to see how to write, format, and distribute a good survey.

Wiggins and McTighe's "Put Understanding First" explains that the goal of school should be teaching for meaning and transfer. It also describes the different teaching methods (direct instruction, facilitation, and coaching) that are necessary for reaching this goal. I loved their suggestion for teaching mean, median, and mode. It seems like students would have a very thorough understanding of all the concepts involved. I remember learning mean, median, and mode, and we definitely only learned how to compute them. It was really boring because the math involved is really easy. We never learned how to use them, so I always thought (and still do a little) that the mode was pointless and that the the median was the only thing worth knowing about. Clearly my education on this was lacking something. However, their method seems like it would take a ton of time on a concept that isn't all that difficult. If teachers covered every concept in every subject like that, they would not get far. I guess that is kind of the point of teaching for understanding and what Wiggins and McTighe point out as the point of school, however. Instead of students having a shallow understanding of everything, they have a complete understanding of a few things and they learn how to learn in general. That idea seems good, but I think it could only work if ALL schools in the country worked that way. Otherwise it would be very difficult for kids who move and would probably be a mess at college where students from different schools come together.

Chapter 3 from How People Learn was all about transfer and what influences students' ability to transfer.  Most of it was pretty straight forward and unsurprising. The most interesting part for me was about the effect context has on transfer. It seemed like a big problem with some of my past classes is that they were so abstract. No context was given and so they seemed impractical. I thought this section was going to explain the need to provide students with context. However, the section actually stated that providing just one context can actually hurt students' ability to transfer. By over contextualizing, students can't see how to apply what they learned to anything but that specific context. The chapter suggests encouraging more flexible thinking by providing multiple contexts, explaining one context and then generalizing, or using problem solving to decide how a problem would be affected by changes. Even though I had never thought of it this way before it makes a lot of sense.