“Zwei zu Eins” ist ein konstruktivistisches Geschichtsspiel konzipiert von Jens Binne mit didaktischen Intentionen. Das Spiel befindet sich noch in Bearbeitung, eine vorläufige Version (Material und Spielregeln) ist aber bereits vorhanden.

Derzeit existiert ein Wiki Eintrag unter

http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/epedagogy/mmswiki/index.php5/Konstruktivistisches_Geschichtsspiel_%22Zwei_zu_Eins%22

Das Spielmaterial befindet sich unter

http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/epedagogy/mmswiki/index.php5/Image:Karten2zu1.pdf

(Bitte 2-4 Spielkarten pro DinA4 Blatt ausdrucken)

Die Anleitung befindet sich hier

http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/epedagogy/mmswiki/index.php5/Image:Spielregeln2zu1.pdf

(Bitte 2 Seiten pro DinA4 Blatt ausdrucken)

Für Hinweise und Anregungen aller Art bin ich sehr dankbar.

Viel Spaß mit dem Spiel!

Ziel:

komplexe Beziehungszusammenhänge darstellen, verstehen und beeinflussen

Merkmale:

• Teile eines Systems werden in Blöcken dargestellt
• Die Beziehungen zwischen den Teilsystemen werden mit Pfeilen dargestellt, wobei die Pfeile gerichteten Wirkungen entsprechen
• Wirkungen werden im Ziel-Teilsystem gemäß seinen inneren Bedingungen (Subsysteme) verarbeitet; daraus folgt ein bestimmtes Verhalten des Teilsystems, das auf andere Teilsysteme oder auf das Teilsystem selbst zurück wirkt, welches das Verhalten ausgelöst hat
• Zwei Teilsysteme mit aufeinander gerichteten Pfeilen sind ein geschlossenes System, das auf einem oder mehreren Kreisprozessen basiert und über diese(n) (ein) feste(s) Beziehungsmuster ausbilden
• Derartige Modelle sollten der Ãœbersicht halber auf drei bis vier Teilsysteme in der Darstellung verallgemeinern (vgl. 1,112)

(1, 113)

(1) Spanhel, Dieter und Hüber, Heinz-Georg: Berufliche Belastungen und Wege zu deren Bewältigung. Bad Heilbrunn 1995 (Seiten 112-113).

This session started with a short discussion about the question, whether we are living in a time to be called integration era‚ because we seem to get more and more connected with cyberspace and machines, or if the terminus information era‚ is still fitting, because we are still using information to get connected and have to exchange information with machines as well.

I think, the main question is wherein the difference between the information era and its ancestor, the industrial age, is laid. Hadn´t the contemporaries of the industrial age have to exchange information as well, even with machines? What quality of indicator distinguishes the industrial age from the information era? Are we maybe living in the cyber age? Today, and this is a difference to the 90is, many people spend much of their time addicted to cyber reality, which is far different to playing Pc-Games in the 90is, because now this people are connected to other people, they have never and likely will never see, but with whom they are sharing a social network, that exceeds their social network in real life.  So where are we?

The Beginning of the information era is situated about 1970, because in this time electronic data processing developed rapidly, so that increasing global streams of information became reality. In difference to the industrial age, the role of information increased and got ahead to the role of producing. The tertiary sector that developed during the industrial age has differentiated so much, that nowadays even the existence of a quartiary sector is postulated, in which the higher qualified personal is aggregated, whereas less qualified and disposable personal belongs to the tertiary sector. With the rise of the industrial age not only the character of economy changed, for the character of society changed too. The society developed from feudal division to class society accompanied by changes in living conditions. So society broke up and reshaped. According to Manuel Castell nowadays society is reshaping again into the network society. Characterising for the network society is, that it is organised more and more within networks, which therefore have are gaining greater importance than ever before. Networks operate international and intercultural, cause of the development of informational technologies. So people, living addicted to cyber reality are part of networks and represent changing living conditions and not an age differing from the information era.

The question, what will come after the information era is not as important as the question how to cope with todays developments. Since the use of information have become important competences to cope with offered information and different Medias are necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8

The discourse about education in Germany responded to this necessities by writing down standards of education that call for the active aid of teachers in developing such competences within the pupils behaviour repertoire.

Actually I don´t know any game that aims in this direction, except maybe the abandoned NETHERNET (This game provided the opportunity to create paths through the internet along a theme for other players, that could rate and discuss these paths after having followed them; see earlier article).

Nethernet (as being presented by a student)

was “[..] an experimental new online game” (1) executed over a Firefox add-on and was played while browsing the web. In difference to common online-games Nethernet was an PMOG, which ‚ stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game. (2) The players could earn data-points for jumping from webpage to webpage in order to buy tools, artefacts and armor to either remove data-points from other players or to defend against enemy actions. According to their browsing and gaming activity every player was linked to one of four guilds, two of them good and two of them evil. While the good ones were trying to disable mines, being deployed on pages by the evil guilds, the evil ones tried to deploy those mines and also tried to eradicate paths, created by the good guilds in order to make unknown websites accessible to the players or to connect aspects over different pages as a theme. Like other kind of role-playing online games the Nethernet featured a forum for players, a real time chat, an own wiki and the opportunity to creat and upgrade an own avatar, with accessible gaming statistics. At last estimated 40,000 players had been attending the game, but on 17.08.2009, almost one and a half year after being started, the game shut down out of growing maintainace costs.

Critics:

Beside the fact, that Nethernet slowed down Firefox, cause of the enduring interaction between the game-server and the players browsing activity it was on the one hand especially this activity that created some kind of security risk for the player. Although deactivating itself at sites, that required a safe browsing environment, like online banking, Nethernet stored the browsing history of the players, which therefore was subject to discussions about the risk of personalised advertisement in the context of a possible selling of Nethernet to another company. On the other hand Nethernet created an all time gaming situation during the use of the internet, so that it had a higher factor of getting people addicted to the game or at least disturbing their other Web activities.

The most positive aspect of the game was, that it provided an opportunity for the players to discover unknown areas of the internet and to gather information about themes. Another important aspect was, that other players got into conversation with each other about their way of browsing the net.

The Nethernet and GBL:

The game might have provided behavioristic (a), cognitivistic (b) and constructivistic (c) aspects.

(a) e.g. repeated stepping on a might have gotten players to try to improve their armor

(b) e.g. those, who tried to improve their armor might have been thinking about ways how to earn quicker more data-points

(c) e.g. some of this players might have decided to create a path through the web for other players.

————————

(1) http://thenethernet.wikia.com/wiki/FAQ_for_interested_tourists

(2) ebd.

This seminar session was started by a classical group game. The group was assigned to the task of getting over a rope, which was fixed across the floor in a height of approximately 1,20 meter. So after one person had jumped over the rope it was possible to lift one after the other over the rope until two persons were left, which also jumped over it. The only rules were, that the task had to be finished within ten minutes and only the closer area was part of the game.

Afterwards the game was discussed freely and these are the main points of the discussion:

1) Because of the involvement of the body teenagers might refuse playing, either, because they dislike getting in contact with some persons or since they might fear to get scored off by someone. So it is necessary to examine group dynamics before inducing such games in a group.

2) Games like this one are favoured in order to influence social group dynamics positively, for example in the professional world of work, but people might react cooperatively in the context of the game and behave egoistic afterwards in the context of work, for they might get personal advantage by acting selfishly. On the other hand it is possible, that people react more emphatic in company with their teammates afterwards, for having done something together.

3) In the context of game based learning and school it is necessary, beside any possible alteration of the game by applying different rules or different settings, to reflect the playing afterwards.

In the second part of this session different aspects where centred.

1) One student had the idea to create a game about the principles of the evolution theory. Pupils could play a game during or additionally to biology lessons, in order to reflect these principles. The idea was, that every pupil should choose one or some species and write down how they would react, adapt, and mutate according to different environmental changes. In regard to playability it might be as well thinkable, that the pupils would play the environment. Two games referring more or less to this kind of concept are the card game Ursuppe and the flashgame pandemic. In Ursuppe each player represents a sort of amoeba and tries to develop its genetic potential at best to win the game. In pandemic the player represents a virus and has to mutate it to let it survive and breed, in order to kill mankind. Another, but more mechanical game design is Conway´s Game of life, in which points can be marked on a checked map and will move, proliferate or disappear according to the amount and arrangement of their neighboured points.

2) Starting from the short film Mensch ärgere Dich nicht by Gerhard Polt, different cultural variants (Sorry!; Pachisi) of this game were introduced.

3) Originating from this aspect the attendants presented their actual game design ideas. The lecturer noted, that the games should be based on the texts read so far and therefore provide, that the players will have to draw meaningful decisions and so on.

Due to the difficulties in understandig this session´s text-basis, the discussion was mostly about understanding the core ideas of the text.

According to the text The Logical Categories of Learning and Communications by Gregory Bateson (1964) five levels of learning and thinking can be distinguished:

0: Zero learning; kind of reacting to stimulus; error corresponds to false reaction

1: Coincidence leads to change in response-specifity [getting better (faster, more precise...) in the way of (re)acting]

2: Change in process of learning equals ability of knowledge-transfer in comparable situations

3: Using system of choice-sets equals ability to abstract from specific or comparable context

4: Still not existent on this planet Trans humanity (=use of technology to improve mankind´s abilities]

Each level can be identified by specific context markers.

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After first discussion about context markers in academic and school learning-environment, which lead to the conclusion, that the individual decides for itself, if the situation is accepted as learning context or not, the discussion came on how to understand the different levels of learning, stated by Bateson, debated in recourse on three contexts:

1. Road learning and Bateson´s Learning Levels

Level 1 would be getting faster in learning vocabulary

Level 2 would be a skill transfer on other contexts, e.g. learning biology terms

Level 3 wasn´t discussed

2. Games and Bateson´s learning levels

a) Board games, e.g. Siedler

Level 1 could be learning to act according to the gamerules

Level 2 would then be studying the tactics of other players and developing an own contextual adaptable tactic

Level 3 wasn´t discussed

b) Pc-games, e.g. Doom and Ultima Underworld

Doom (shooter gamer)

Level 1 could be learning to shoot Monsters/enemies

Level 0 would then be to do this every time an enemy appears

So error on this level would be not to react and get killed

Level 1 then would be to get more effective in killing the enemy

Ultima Underworld (U.U.) (adventure game)

Level 1 would be to notice, that killing an Orc in U.U. is not the same as killing an Orc in Doom, cause Orcs don´t need to be enemies in U.U., for they can be trading partners as well

Level 2 would then mean, to learn, that shooter games and adventure games and maybe other kind of games are existing and, that therefore it is necessary to proof different strategies in game-playing

3. constructivistic GBL and Bateson´s Learning Levels

Pc-games, e.g. September 12^th

This game is about shooting terrorists in an Arabic city with missiles, but can´t be won, for there is no winning destination formulated. The player has to choose, whether to shoot or not to shoot. Shooting mostly leads to the creation of new terrorists, for it´s almost impossible not to kill civilians as well. But not shooting won´t diminish the number of terrorists as well.

So the intention of the game is to lead the player to level 3 learning; abstracting from the game context to reality and attitude towards terrorism fighting

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personal remark

I´d like to know, how Bateson´s learning levels can be applied on Gagné´s hierarchic model of forms of learning?

aus Mandl, Heinz / Reinmann, Gabi (2006): Unterrichten und Lernumgebungen gestalten. In: Andreas Krapp, Bernd Weidenmann (Hg.): Pädagogische Psychologie. Ein Lehrbuch. Fünfte, vollständig überarbeitete Auflage. Weinheim, S.623.

Starting from the remark of a student, that figuring out, whether (regarding to Heinz von Foerster) a question can be considered to be decidable or undecidable, seems to be difficult, the discussion in this seminar session developed – important points:

• The answerability depends on the context and the system in which question arises
  • If language is an obstacle, question won´t be understood

  -> no labels exist, no decision is possible

  • Every question can be pushed forward until no answer is possible

  -> to answer knowledge is necessary

->> Questions and knowledge depend on tools to explore the world

->> Radical constructivists know only undecidable questions, moderate constructivists know also decidable

Regarding to the concept of closure (explained in the text by McCloud: understanding comics) the audience concluded that:

• Concepts or ideas are needed to fill the gaps
• An understanding or an idea of a/the greater context can be useful situations, that need closure on the level of language
• Children have to learn a fundamental concept of closure by the age of one year e.g. the object permanence (like Peak a Boo)

->> Today, children being very often confronted with media, concepts of closure can be trained in contact with media

The main part of this session was used to discuss what kind of constructivistic games might be linked to decidable or undecidable questions and to the concept of closure and how such games possibly might support education:

Since closure is part of everyday life (e.g.: if noise from the kitchen is perceived, it is linked to a possible source; traffic signs ‚Äì traffic signs and other symbols simplify the illustration, but therefore amplify the information) and can be synonymised as to associate (like transferring knowledge in different contexts or like being able to identify a smiley as a synonym for a face) or lateral thinking, closure is part of many games, like Puzzles, Sagaland, Nobody´s perfect and Pen-and-paper-games.

Pen-and-paper-games are extremely constructivistic, for maybe every participant is creating a different imagination of the setting. There is an opportunity to get lost within the game, which shall hindered by the game-master. But moreover the opportunity to close the gap between reality and game-reality exist. An example for this is given in the film Mazes and Monsters with Tom Hanks, who mixes up in-game-reality with reality; so maybe this is comparable to the existing debate about First-Person-Shooters and gun rampages committed by pupils, who used to play this games.

In the context of school-learning, the use of closure in regard to game based learning (gbl) is possible, e.g. using word-based games in French, like Scrabbled-wrdos-Games, word chains, or something like Stadt Land Fluss. It is evident, that constructivistic aspects are possible. In behalf of Stadt Land Fluss this means, that pupils make up the categories.

One objection might be, that pupils have to learn facts, which are proved by tests, but on the other hand inert knowledge is more likely produced under the pressure of school routine. So gbl might produce less inert knowledge, for it allows learning without pressure. Moreover facts are constantly changing, so that skills are therefore even more necessary to cope with changing facts. The aim should be to enable pupils, to take a point of view in undecidable questions, to take responsibility. Role-playing-games or simulations offer a chance to train this ability.

What is an indexical representation? What are its benefits (or disadvantages) in contrast to a description?

Indexical representations are indirect and context-bound references. That means for instance that the denomination of the colour red may refer to:

a) love when a amorous situation is described

b)Exhaustion, when the colour of the face of a sprinter after tournament is described,

c)To flowers, when the appearance of a field in spring or summer is mentioned

d) …

Since meaning of words, sounds … are mostly acquired by daily activity and discourse, there are, to stay with the example, many context-bound representations possible. The advantage of indexical representations lays in their metaphoric and thus more likely to be remembered character and accessibility in contextual perception. Their disadvantage is their undistinctiveness. Because failure in discourse may occur, if people refer to different representations without noticing. Thats why in scientific discourses sometimes at first termini are defined.

How would you prepare a learning subject according to situated cognition?

I would provide a contextualised situation in which the learners could develop their own constructs within a situated learning environment. Therefore it would be necessary, that the pupils could draw own decisions concerning the learning strategies and themes within the subject. Emphasis would be laid on social interaction and activity of the pupils, even letting them participate in evaluation. This is why I would tend to Anchored-Instruction. Cause according to Anchored-Instruction it could be possible to show a film which confronts the pupils with an authentic problem, they should solve, so that in the following time they could try to create solutions and gain knowledge. According to Cognitive-Apprenticeship pupils would be confronted with an operation, that the teacher would do first and in the following time would let them do more and more on their own‚ so it´s limited to the chance of providing likely situations in the environment of school and I am doubtfully about this possibility.

For what kind of knowledge do you think would a behaviouristic teaching method be useful and appropriate?

The method would be useful in the case of acquiring semantic, declarative knowledge. The example, chosen by Blumstengel, training of vocabulary, is representative for this kind of knowledge. So, similar knowledge would be medical nomenclature or other forms of scientific terminologies. Also episodic, declarative knowledge like intersubjective accepted facts about historic events could be learned by this method. I think that even the Training of the steps of standardized (and important) operations/activities can be supported, e.g. the learning of sequences of dressing a wound –infections must not occur by letting an apprentice dress a wound improperly.

What are the differences and what is the similarity between behaviouristic and cognitivistic view on a learner and knowledge?

While both approaches tend to focus an objectivistic few, the difference between them lies in the conception of the learner. While behaviourists don´t bother for the inner of the individual and focus instead on the outer setting of learning, cognitivists emphasize the inner, independent activity of the learner. So possibly the first position is extrinsic and output-orientated while the second one focuses more on intrinsic input-output-oriented learning.

What is the difference between a cognitivistic and a constructivistic view on learning?

While cognitivists assume that an objectivistic reality exists, constructivists insist that there are many views (on reality), which cannot be distinguished in right or wrong. Constructivists disagree that there is any connection between the external representation and the internal processes and focus instead on the individual perception, interpretation and construction of knowledge in social contexts.

What is inert knowledge (träges Wissen), and how can it be prevented?

Inert knowledge defines knowledge which the indivual cannot use in a situation, though having acquired it once, because this kind of knowledge weren´t situated enough whilst the learning process, so that it´ll become difficult to transfer. Constructivists try to prevent this by connecting the learning process to complex, realistic and varriating problems, so that the principles of solution(methods) can be learned (contextualisation/de-contextualisation).