Spielkinnings

Can Kurt Squire be assigned a moderate or radical constructivist stance concerning games for learning?

In my opinion, Kurt Squire can be assigned a moderate constructivist stance concerning games for learning because he considers the world a place that actually exists and that needs to be discovered. According to Squire «education is about having experiences that give rise to particular viewpoints, or ways of making sense of the world‚Äù (Squire, p 19).

A radical constructivist stance would completely deny the existence of a world outside humans as they are autopoietic systems (see Blumstengel, p1). Blumstengel describes the difference of moderate and radical constructivistic stances like this: «Dagegen negiert der Solipsismus

die Existenz einer “äußeren”, “realen” Wirklichkeit gänzlich. Zwischen diesen beiden Extrempositionen neigen “radikale” Vertreter des Konstruktivismus stark dem letzteren Standpunkt zu. In moderaterer Form gehen Konstruktivisten dagegen davon aus, daß die externe Welt zwar existiert‚Ķ« (Blumstengel, p1).

Do this before you take a look in the texts. Do you remember one or more concepts from the texts to be of interest to you, that fascinated you or occupied your mind in any form? Briefly describe the most important concept(s) or idea(s) in your own words; again, try so without looking it/them up.

Bateson divided the way humans learn into five parts: Zero Learning, Learning I, Learning II, Learning III; and Learning IV. Whereas Zero Learning implies that an individual does not learn at all, Learning I is a simple correction of errors within a set of alternatives, Learning II is the corrective change of a set of alternatives, and Learning III is a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives. Bateson also defines Learning IV but at the same time he states that this kind of Learning would not exist in any living organism on earth.

I was definitely fascinated by this concept of different kinds of learning by Gregory Bateson. To be honest, I had not read too many texts about learning to learn before this one and now I am truly inspired by Bateson. Not that I think his definitions of learning types is the only correct way. But it reminds me of how important it is to think about how we learn. It can save us a lot of time and effort if we improve the effectiveness with which we study and gain knowledge.

Ask three questions, related to the topics, that you would like to have asked yourself, the lecturer, your fellow students, the world (Many of the questions asked during the past sessions were just puzzles of “discovery or invention”, as H.v.Foerster would put it).

1. Is it possible to learn how to change myself? For example, I know many things that I want to do differently: I don’t want to be competitive, jealous, greedy, capitalistic etc. However, these things have been learned throughout a lifetime and even if I rationally know what I want to do differently it is almost impossible to change. Furthermore, even if I manage to change one of these properties, will I ever be able to learn how to do it more quickly?
2. Do you think it is possible to learn complex issues like «Integral-Rechnung‚Äù by playing games?
3. Are there existing seminars, classes that facilitate learning of complex issues only through games?

Can you draw a connection between Bateson‚Äôs categories of learning, von Foersters “in principle undecidable questions”, McCloud’s concept of “closure” and Sutton-Smith‚Äôs playful innovation (or Glasbergs research on novelty)?

This is an attempt to answer the question above as it would have taken me a much more extensive study of the texts to be better able to answer this one. However, as I already exceeded my time limit for this question, I came up with the following draft:

I think that all these texts have one thing in common: They are constructivistic approaches to learning. In von Foerster‚Äôs article, people who decide ‚Äûin principle undecidable questions« are the discoverers of the world; McCloud‚Äôs concept of closure teaches us that we construct our own reality by concluding what happens in «the gutter‚Äù, in order to facilitate Bateson‚Äôs Learning III it needs a constructivistic view of the world because you cannot teach Learning III – it must be constructed; Sutton-Smith‚Äôs concept of playful innovation describes the function of games as an extension of adaptive behaviour potential ‚Äì the child achieves (constructs) a level of mental and behavioural structure that anticipates what might happen in other adaptive areas.

1. What points draw criticism (see Thissen) when knowledge is seen as a purely objectivistic phenomenon?

Learning is seen here as a simple reception of selected contents. There is no space for the individual to develop his own strategies how to learn or better how to construct knowledge. According to Thissen objectivism entails that there is only one perfect order in which bits of knowledge are presented. Furthermore, Thissen criticizes that the teacher knows what the learner must know and that the teacher controls the learning process.

This kind of learning leads to knowledge that is easily forgotten and difficult to transfer by the learner, Thissen argues. Learners do not develop sufficient strategies that help them to solve more complex problems. Moreover learners do not get the opportunities to learn how to cope with situations that are common in dynamic societies. However, it is these strategies that are necessary to successfully act in social contexts.

2. What is ‚Äûmetacognition«?

The term «metacognition‚Äù describes the knowledge about the own cognitive processes and their conditions. According to Weidenmann et al. There are three relevant areas

-         knowledge about the person and his own skills

-         knowledge about problems such as how to extract meaning from difficult texts

-         knowledge about cognitive strategies like learning by hard

3. Why do humans, according to constructivist views, don’t have an input and output for meaningful information?

According to Blumstengel, constructivists argue that the reason why humans do not have informational input or output is that humans are autopoietic systems. These systems are self-organized and do have a closed structure. Hence, information is only produced by the system itself. Furthermore, Knuth/Cunnigham argue that «humans cannot take in information from the outside world and map it onto mental symbols that are then manipulated and processed‚Äù.

Whenever the player (anyone) is trying to be good at a «game‚Äù, be it a computer game where he tries to reach a high score, or a football game that he wants to win, or just a simple assignment like this that he wants to get a good grade for (all these examples I will refer to as a game), he is in a competitive context. Solving these problems results in reinforcement as he feels happy that he was successful and perhaps other people are telling him what a great person he is. A context marker for this competitive context would be a score, a set of (playing-) rules, or the presence of a «referee‚Äù (which can be a professor, a football coach, or a computer).

In a competitive context like the above, the player tries to reach a good result. And in order to achieve this he needs to learn and improve his game. This can be done by trial and error. For example, in a football match a child would take the football and try to run to the other side in order to shoot a goal without passing the ball to a team member. Then it finds out, that it often looses the ball and that everybody is always angry so it starts passing – Learning I took place. However, another form of trial and error may lead to higher form of learning.

A higher form of learning (Learning II) may take place when a «player‚Äù keeps trialing and failing at his games or simply is not as good at a game as he would like to. For example, he is just an average football player in his team, he gets average grades at his assignments, or he does not manage to make the high score in a computer game. Independent of the game that is played, the player will ask himself what he can do to improve. Finally he figures out that by playing more goal-oriented (in case of a computer game he more often things about what he wants to achieve in this game (main goal) and what needs to be done for this, in case of the football game he starts to regularly check his skills and what skills need to be improved first to make him a better football player, and in case of the assignment he does not only read a text and then answer the questions but he starts checking the questions more often so he reads what is necessary to answer the questions more carefully) he is much more successful. Subconsciously the player constructs transferable strategies that help him improving his games. Although he first found out that he needs to be more goal-oriented when he played a computer game he realized that the learned concept would work for other games too. Indeed, he did learn a general concept how to learn – Learning II. The context that led to this learning is basically the same context as the context for Learning I. However, in this context, the player is observing himself and how he is doing in context I. Markers for this context can be very complex (i.e. a feeling of confusion, getting lost, losing control etc.).

In Learning II, the player has learned how to rearrange or extend his sets of actions that lead to success. If he is very good at this he will become very successful at all these games (also depending on genes). Furthermore, he will probably be very good at his job. Nevertheless, the player might be desperately lonely at a certain point (error). He realizes that the way he learned to learn is not healthy to him. Now he must learn that he must change this system (i.e. he needs a less competitive view of life) – Learning III. However, this learning is very hard to grasp and probably takes a complete reorganization of character (Bateson). Moreover, Learning III is realized by very few people Рthere is a reason why many people argue – he will never change. The context of this Learning might be a spiritual environment like a temple or your own house. Context markers would then be everything that inspires a spiritual conversion or meditation process like the carpet that is knelt on, the process of kneeling itself, candles etc.

Alright… after having understood our course requirements I will put up a protocol of our last session:

After greeting us Wey-Han Tan told us that he is currently writing his master thesis and we should apologize if sometimes he is not as sharp as he usually is . Without hesitation he then asked whether the question whether a question is undecidable or decidable is undecidable or decidable.

Thekla said that basically every question is undecidable. We then discussed why a question is decidable or undecidable and concluded that it mainly depends on whether we consider us part or apart of the universe. According to Heinz Foerster you can decide if you see yourself as a citizen of an independent universe who observes and explores a world with existing rules or you may see yourself as «the participant of a conspiracy, whose customs, rules, and regulations we are now inventing‚Äù. In a nutshell, you can choose to be an inventor or a discoverer.¬† Our forum now concluded that the discoverers tend to consider most of the questions decidable whereas the inventors consider them undecidable.

The next question we discussed in the forum was if there is closure in gaming. All of us agreed that there are various kinds of closure that may be observed in gaming. We then named a few games like Poker and Sagaland and described some of the processes of closure that take place in these games.

Birte mentioned that «object permanence‚Äù is an important principle of closure. In order to explain what object permanence was we used the example «peek a boo‚Äù that was also provided in the cartoon “Blood in the Gutter” by Mcloud. The game «Peek a boo‚Äù is often used by mothers to illustrate that things that are covered or hidden are still there even though you don‚Äôt see them anymore. According to Birte this concept of object permanence is very important. She said that according to Piaget we wouldn‚Äôt «understand mathematics if we don‚Äôt get the principle of object permanence.‚Äù

The forum agreed that object permanence and closure are important concepts to learn.  Thus, Wey-Han Tan asked us how closure can be learned and how media help or hinder this learning process. Unfortunately we go a little distracted from the second part of the question by the necessity of the decision whether or not we want to discuss this in groups or in the forum. We decided to continue our discussion in the forum.

The first thing we had found was that we needed to categorize the kind of closure that needs to be learned. Furthermore, there are different kinds of closure processes that are needed for different subjects. We tried to find games that teach closure in subjects like geography, language and biology and discussed some of them.

There were pen and paper games we considered as highly favorable for learning processes of closure. The only things that we have in those games are words and all the other processes are simply performed in our minds. Wey-Han Tan said that role playing games were the «ego shooters‚Äù of the late 80‚Äôs and early 90‚Äôs and evil to some activists. Furthermore, we discussed games that were based on lateral thinking (i.e. black stories) and found them appropriate for learning closure.

However, we did not find a lot of games for every subject we named earlier but we had some interesting results in finding games that would support the learning of closure in language learning and biology. We concluded that games like «Nobody is Perfect‚Äù , jump and run games in which you verbalize actions in a foreign language, and lateral thinking games in general would be beneficial for the learning of closure in language learning. What is more, we considered a game useful for the learning of closure in biology where you tell a story about a biological object (i.e. a cell) and the others have to guess what that the story teller is talking about.

In the end of our seminar, one of the students claimed that learning closure from games is very difficult because games would have a «safe frame‚Äù and do not display reality. On the other hand, another student argued, the self confidence of a player can be positively reinforced in reality by his achievements in a game.

In conclusion, we talked a lot about games, closure and metaphysics. In the end we very briefly discussed our responsibility for our decisions and the relation to radical constructivism. Hence, Wey-Han Tan reminded us to focus on constructivism and games in our seminar.