Gamification.nu

Levelling up

For some time now I’ve been trying to see how scaffolding can help to ‘level up’ students in a meaningful way. It is both being used in education and in game design to help someone reach a goal in steps that match and challenge someone’s skills. There’s many places to start thinking about this, from the ideas of Vygotski (ZPD) to Dreyfus & Dreyfus, from the ideas of Bloom to Bateson. What is the ladder or pyramid I want my students to ascend? How do I facilitate the kind of ‘flow’ (Csíkszentmihályi) where more skill and knowledge are needed after every step? What ultimately defines an expert?

I have recently discovered www.learningandteaching.info, a website that is entirely written and maintained by James Atherton. He wrote an elaborate post about expertise that not only makes more sense of the Dreyfus & Dreyfus model for me, but also defined the true expert as someone who treats daily practice like a game. Following Roger Caillois, I would call this gamelike approach by experts ‘ludus’ indeed, although I would argue that ‘paida’ could just as easily be typical (behaviour) for great experts. Think for instance of Richard Feynman that one day decided he would only start doing things for the fun of it at the University, which led directly to the work he received a Nobel prize for. Of course he was playing a ‘serious game’, but in a field that was that new (quantum mechanics), he had to also just ‘play around’ with it first.

My biggest discovery is definitely the idea of threshold concepts (TC). It trancends the issue of scaffolding and mastery by trying to figure out if students will actually learn anything worth learning at all in my classes. As far as I get it, a threshold concept is an insight (or belief) that offers a complete new way of looking at a subject and which obliterates any previous way of seeing. For instance, once you know how to read, you can not NOT read and from now on you ARE a reader. In a way I guess this is how I quit smoking successfully after three failed attempts: I first had to convince myself I was a non-smoker and then it was hard to think of myself as smoking again. So once you’re over this threshold, there’s no way back to the way you used to BE.

Think of a Threshold Concept as a portal into another dimension. The above screenshot I edited from Portal 2 is in fact not the same kind of portal (TC), as you can easily go back through that portal. Understanding the portal dimension itself in Portal IS actually a TC in my opinion. The first time I played Portal, I definitely had to first learn what kind of navigation a portal enabled. Troublesome knowledge for sure. Once I ‘got it’ I entered a new reality: ‘Now you’re thinking with portals!’

The thing is, it’s hard to pinpoint what a Threshold Concept exactly is and how it is different from simply learning a key concept for instance. It seems more of a revelation than something you can master, yet more often than not it takes just as much effort to finally have this revelation as it takes to master something. And there is no guarantee you will ‘get it’ (or ‘believe it’) in the end. So if a TC cannot be mastered in simple steps, can there be any form of scaffolding my lessons at all? That is what I’m struggling with.

Currently I am trying to define the TC in my lessons on Cross-media Communication, so I may then see how I can get my students over these thresholds. As TC are still very much a field that needs more exploration, I have taken the liberty to ignore the idea that TC cannot be learned in clear forward steps by students, simply because I need to give myself a chance to learn from making the right mistakes. That way I may learn exactly why it is so hard for students (and myself) to master a TC. I think I need to make mistakes, because it is in the spirit of a TC, where one has to go back and forth continuously to grasp something. And I’m still in my holidays, so there’s no harm in playing around with it a little bit.

So let’s presume some aspect of a TC can be mastered or scaffolded, what would it be? Are some TC more important than others? Can I make more threshold concepts follow each other up in a meaningful way? Can I make a series of ‘portals’ to guide my students through? 

So first here are the TC that I imagine exist in the field of Cross-media Communication. The way I ‘found’ them, is by simply trying to complete the following sentences:

• ‘Why can my students not see that …..’
• ‘It’s actually quite simple, it’s really about …..’
• ‘This one student suddenly got it when …..’
• ‘The first time I understood what this was really about, was when …..’

From this came the following attempts to define TC in cross-media:

• Media are extensions

Many students love to try out new media without understanding what they are about. Especially in advertising, students love to check out what’s hot in the media landscape and move onto the next big thing before they ever grasp the essence of the medium they just used. What helps to really start understanding and working with new media, is the notion that media are basically extensions of our body and mind (Mc Luhan). Your shoe is an extension of your foot. TV is an extension of your eyes. A flag is an extension of your country. A give-away pen is an extension of your company. 

I think every student should at least have read ‘The medium is the message’ once in their lifetime. It will make them see the world through new eyes. Once I had read it (as a student), something inside me ‘clicked’. Before I read the book, surely I had observed how a tool like a hammer can become part of you body. But that did not mean that I actually truly grasped the underlying principle. Yet once I got it, I suddenly could no longer observe the world around me without this notion. I think it is this notion that should kick-off my semester of Cross-media. How else will my students ever understand in which fundamental ways companies use media as extensions of their brand.

 Once you see media this way, you can really start to deeply understand the nature of the media you select.

• The art of communication is really the art of coding

What some students get particularly frustrated by is when the audience does not understand what they mean while they think they are clearly communicating directly (either verbally or in cross-media). They assume that if they themselves understand what they are trying to get across, then others will understand this message as well. It often does not matter how much I talk about differences in culture, language, perspective or context. They often still claim that it’s all just laziness on the part of the observers if they do not understand the message: ‘If they really care about what I have to say, they should make an effort to understand me’.

I found the best way to let them understand how silly that is, is by giving groups a coded message from outer space (I am from Nasa and just intercepted this message) and letting them crack the message without giving them any clue. Not only do they not understand it, soon enough they discover that everyone in the group ‘reads’ a set of very common symbols in a completely different way (the aliens communicate through a set of three random pictures from Google Images, thinking we earthlings will surely understand this). Even a set of two visual cliches like a heart and a ladder do not make any sense by themselves. It is how they are combined into a new image that allows them to make sense. The lesson being taught here is that communication is an indirect, two-step process of coding and decoding and that all we can do as professional advertisers is to code a message in such a way that the audience may really ‘get it’ when decoding the message.

Once you see communication as indirect and coding-decoding, you can no longer think your ideas or visuals will speak for themselves.

• Brands do not create brand meaning, people do

I forgot who wrote this and now I cannot find it back online (so it must be quoted wrong), but I love this notion. It’s about how we must understand that in Cross-media, we cannot really add value or meaning to something, we can only attribute it and hope that the audience will feel the same way. In the study of affordances, we can see that people may use your amazing give-away pencil not to write, but to scratch their back while they are typing on their laptop. The value the pencil has for its owner has nothing to do with the value the company wanted it to have. The user may even start to associate the logo of your lawyer firm with getting rid of itches. Which unintentionally may be quite spot-on about what you are about as a law firm, but that’s a different story.

 Once you see meaning and value this way, you can really start seeing your brand through he eyes of others.

I’m not sure if one, two or all three may really be pure threshold concepts, but they surely offer students a new way of looking at media applications. Most of it actually seems to be about learning to see your work through the eyes of others. 

Then I saw the brilliant talk on threshold concepts by Professor David Perkins and I sensed I had stumbled upon something useful for my scaffolding mission. Perkins distinguishes a shift from ‘object’ to ‘tool’ to ‘frame’ that make up the steps towards grasping a TC (which I assume is mostly about the frame). 

In my field, being cross-media, I would argue that seeing media as extensions would be the first TC or at least the first step towards the final TC. It somehow makes the step from objects (media) to tools (instruments). The second step, from tool to frame, has more to do with the ability to see your media as meaningless instruments, unless you can create a cross-media strategy with them that connects to the context or culture of your audience and can be decoded by them. And voila: TC accomplished! I can only hope it will be that simple.

That being said, I want to map out various activities (playful learning like the alien message example) that will get students to step over these ‘thresholds’. From physical and virtual media to communication tools to (new) strategic perspectives. And ultimately I would love for the students to develop new frameworks, new ways of looking at possible strategies, really improving or changing the game of cross-media advertising, so that they may breathe media by the time they are professional advertisers.

It is also exciting for me to see that Perkins has written a book (I just ordered it) on education in which he uses the analogy of learning to play baseball in ‘Little League’ first, to grasp the whole game (the basic rules), before one can become a probaseball  player. This seems to offer another way to imply scaffolding as well and makes me think of tutorial levels in games which I have written about before). As soon as I have the book in my mail and read it, I’m sure I’ll write a blogpost about this aspect. 

For a quite a few mornings in a row now, I get out of bed early, excited to read more about some aspect of learning I have not learned about and I somehow always end up on Atherton’s website. Not only because it offers such a nice and eclectic collection of theories and references, but also because I really like how he analyzes it, improves on it, discards ideas that he thinks do not work (James, thank you for pointing out the helpful book ‘Visible Learning’ by the way) and how he annotates his own texts, often with a typical sense of humour of a man struggling to create an optimal learning environment within rigid school systems.

P.s. : These are the three main sources that have triggered my thoughts on Threshold Concepts:

1) Threshold Concepts in the wild - Expanded version (Atherton, Hadfield and Meyers) - 2008 2) Threshold Concepts - Another angle (James Atherton) 3) Threshold Concepts - Moving concepts from objects to instruments to action (Professor David Perkins) 2011