Picture by Jonathan Mak Long

The story behind this misattribution, according to The Atlantic, is that it went viral after Jessica Dovey posted a status update on Facebook but added MLK's quotation at the end and the two became associated:

From Jessica Dovey:

"I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."

From Martin Luther King Jr.:

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Evidently, people missed the start of the quotation marks and thought Dovey's words were MLK's.

Another one that went viral soon after the event was the misattributed Mark Twain quotation:

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

The problem with this wasn't just that it was requoted wrong, it was also attributed to the wrong person. The person who actually said it was Clarence Darrow (the lawyer involved in the Scopes trial, the basis for Inherit the Wind):

"I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction."

Here's another, from President Reagan on the Challenger disaster:

"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"

Many people assumed it was something Reagan came up on his own, but he was actually quoting an American aviatar and poet, John Gillespie Magee, Jr.'s poem High Flight, which was written about the Battle of Britain:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Here's another one: The story of the boy and the starfish. If you haven't heard it, here's the gist: An old man sees a young boy along the beach, throwing starfish into the waves. He goes over and asks him why he's doing that, and the boy says the starfish were washed up by the tide, and that they'll die in the sun. The old man points out that there're thousands of starfish and surely he can't make a difference. The boy picks up another starfish and throws it back into the waves, and says "It made a difference to that one." It's a story used by motivational speakers. I think the first time I heard it was during the last class I attended in business school. It's a nice, simple, moving story about how small actions can make huge differences.

But that story wasn't an original. It was adapted from a short story The Star Thrower by Loren Eisenly, which includes this key, unbroken section:

The shore grew steeper, the sound of the sea heavier and more menacing, as I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. I was away from the shellers now and strode more rapidly over the wet sand that effaced my footprints. Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon's rim--an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its food I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.

Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half-mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.

In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.

"It's still alive," I ventured.

"Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sunk in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.

"It may live," he said, "if the offshore pull is strong enough." He spoke gently, and across his bronzed worn face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.

"There are not many who come this far," I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. "Do you collect?"

"Only like this," he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. "And only for the living." He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.

"The stars," he said, "throw well. One can help them."

He looked full at me with faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.

Quotations are fun. They're beautiful when they're articulated just right, and even better when they're timely. But they can be tricky because was live in a dynamic age now and we're dealing with literacies that are between the immediacy of orality and the permanence of print. It's too easy to pass a misquoted line along through social networks at a time when a precise sentiment is arguably more important than authenticity.

Note: I did my best to ensure that none of these "corrected attributions" are themselves misattributed in some way. If you've notice any errors, please point them out to me.

The details about levelling up in rank isn't displayed prominently, so I had to do some digging around to find it. Here's a passage that gives you some idea of what levelling up means:

To level up on GameSpot, all you need to do is to spend your time here. The levelling system exists in order to encourage users to come back to the site, and enjoy using it, in whatever way they want. This means there is really no set method of levelling up.

Common ways of spending time here include but are not limited to: visiting the forums, posting, reading articles and blogs, watching videos, updating your profile etc. It is factors such as these which contribute towards a user's activity level, and thus, their level itself.

This is gamification. It's basically a way of using symbols (badges, titles, ranks, levels, etc.) to signify your status in a community. In broader terms, it is used to encourage certain behaviors, such has developing healthy habits, or quitting bad ones.

Gamification on Gamespot has done nothing for me. I'm aware of its existence but it hasn't encouraged me to participate any more than I normally would if it wasn't gamified, nor has it made me want to change my form of participation on the site. I don't know what the badges mean and I couldn't care less about them. I love the site, though, and the people there are pretty helpful and friendly. I usually go there to find out about games or to discuss ones that I'm either in the process of playing or have just completed. After that, I'm done with the community until the next time I want to go back. I don't care about my rank at Gamespot, nor do I care about other members' rank or achievements. Perhaps pro-gamification people can argue that Gamespot isn't well-gamified, and that it's far more effective if it used different means of gamification. Or perhaps Gamespot is too broad and diverse a community for gamification to work effectively.

A little over a year ago, a blog posted at Terranova (a gaming blog) by Edward Castronova described Professor Lee Sheldon's approach of using game design in a college classroom. (The word "gamification" or "gamify" doesn't appear in the blog post as it hadn't become a buzz word yet.) In short, the class was divided into "guilds" and students were allowed to go on different quests. Reward came in the form of points awarded based on the quality of the work. (You should read the blog post itself for more details.) The course itself was on "Multiplayer Game Design," so I suppose it lends itself easier to the format. As far as I can tell, this is gamification. It sounds like rephrasing things, so that "group work" becomes "guild quest" and so on. Not having been a student of the course myself, I can't say whether that would've worked on everyone, but I'm assuming that someone enrolled in a game design course would be more open to this format than others. In other words, it's a very self-selective group.

Then there's Jesse Schell, a Carnegie Mellon professor who gave a talk at DICE in 2010 that caused a lot of buzz at the time. Schell's talk focuses first on a list of unexpectedly successful trends, such as Club Penguin, Webkins, Mafia Wars and Farmville, and discusses why they've been successful. His argument is that these games have been successful because they've started tapping into "reality," making people take real-world actions (e.g., spend real money). Then he argues that companies will start building in sensors in their gadgets and devices, seemingly assuming that consumers would be okay with this, such that your toothbrush can tell if you've been brushing your teeth, and so on. He speculates that one day we'll be in a world when our cereal boxes and soda bottles will have sensors, cameras, and screens, basically like Minority Report but a lot more disturbing. Except, he sees this as a good thing and as an inevitability in the future, and he ends the talk by saying that, if we're being watched all the time and if all our actions are being tracked, then maybe we'll force ourselves to behave better. Watching that clip today is particularly disconcerting because it sounds like Schell read Orwell and Huxley and decided that their depictions of dystopian futures are good visions that both should be brought into existence, one where we're under constant surveillance and where amusement is the driving force behind society. The best (or worst?) of two dystopic worlds. Fortunately, a year later, most of his predictions have gone in the opposite direction, because people are genuinely protective in their privacy settings. They don't like being tracked or monitored, they don't want to share everything they do with all their friends, and they don't like to be watched in the privacy of their homes. Most of all, they don't want corporations and governments doing any of this surveillance, even if it's for benevolent reasons.

I'm not the only one baffled and disturbed by Schell's vision of the future. If you do an Internet search of the words "Disturbing Presentation," this talk comes up on top. But note, again, that Schell doesn't use the words "gamified" in his talk even though it clearly is a form of gamification.

For gamification to work smoothly, it has to assume that people are "rational" and can be gently manipulated by reward and punishment. It assumes that people can be guided to follow actions if they are rewarded (by points, by status, and however these are connected to a larger community or system), and that we can rationally make simple decisions. But this assumption is problematic at best. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, gave a fascinating TED talk on the fact that we are not rational beings, at least not in the way that rationality is conventionally defined. His book, Predictably Irrational, extends this argument with counter intuitive examples that he conducted. Of relevance here is his chapter "The Problems of Self-Control and Procrastination," where he sets up an experiment to test how his students will deal with procrastination. There are three conditions: 1) Students are given a specific deadline for their assignments; 2) Students can set their own deadlines but must abide by them, and 3) Students can submit their assignments whenever, without committing to a deadline. Turns out that the class given the strict deadlines performed better (i.e., submitted better papers) and the class that was given no deadline did worst. The connection to gamification might not be strong, but it does suggest that human behavior isn't as straightforward as we would expect it to be. The more choices we have in a given decision, the less likely we'll act in a rational way.

Ariely's book is filled with examples that defy our conventional wisdom on rationality, but perhaps these can be considered proof that gamification can and does work because why else would people spend real money on virtual goods, or care about arbitrary achievement badges and ranks? 'Cause even though I don't care about my Gamespot rank and achievement badges, I'm pretty sure some people do, and they're willing to devote time to the site to improve their ranking. But this brings us to ethical questions as well: If you know people can be manipulated, should you manipulate them "for their own good"?

The conversation on gamification has changed since a year ago. For starters, we have a word for it now. We also have more people talking about it and taking positions on its effectiveness. We also have more game researchers speaking out against gamification, for a variety of reasons, but I'll leave that discussion and some questions for a forthcoming post. For now, I'm trying to remain open-minded to see whether this is something that could work if it was 1) designed in a non-trivial, non-invasive manner and 2) implemented properly. There are clearly gamified systems that seem to work, but there might be many others that don't. Assuming that no approach works 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of its users, we need to hear more about these counter examples to see what more we can learn about gamification.

Stay tuned for Part II.

In a chapter published in the Handbook of Research on New Literacies, Constance Steinkuehler (2008) argues that "we need a more robust account of meaning-making process itself." In this book, I've attempted to respond to that call for research by using a sociological approach that's been used in human-computer interaction studies. A common way of studying games today is through pre- and post-test studies, using quantitative methods to study variables that might impact gameplay. While these studies have been important to the field, they are limited by their ability to describe the actual process of gameplay itself, or respond to why it is that these variables impact gameplay. Moreover, many videogames are designed to be played for hours, not minutes, and players' relationships with games change over these long periods of time. Play has become a "black box" that we seldom look into and, in some case, are not interested in studying, because it's a mess to describe.

The approach used in the book was used by Lucy Suchman when she was at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, studying users following instructions in photocopiers. She found out that the interaction between users and machines can be described as a turn-taking mechanism, during which both parties (the user and the designer) have expectations for how the other processes meaning. When meanings are congruent, then the interaction proceeds smoothly; but Suchman had noticed that when communication breaks down, it is due to one or both parties making inaccurate assumptions that instructions were correctly followed, during which time the user will have to figure out where along the interaction did meaning become unclear.

The book explores games along the same lines, focusing on how players interact with one another (how meanings are developed between players) and how players interact with the game design. Some key findings described in the book are:

• Players can misunderstand aspects of the game design and still proceed with the play with little to no impediment. This forces us to question how is it that we can ensure the intended game meaning is communicated accurately to players. In commercial games, this is seldom a problem because the key goal is for the players to have fun, however they choose to define meaning. In educational or serious games, this becomes more of a concern because we don't want players to walk away with the wrong message.
• Players develop meanings independent of the game design. Even while interacting within the design of the game, players are actively looking for meaning, especially in situations where they are playing with one another. The games I describe in the book are fighting games, which are ideal for players who want to play in a group. I noticed that players found creative ways of developing meanings that were unique to themselves, and found ways of defining aspects of gameplay that were important to them, e.g. cheating vs. fairness.
• Meaning-making is not a static process. Meanings change over time. The more time they spend with the game, the more they can incorporate information in the game. Since this is a qualitative study, I was able to describe these changes over long stretches of time as well as on a moment-to-moment basis.
• The way players talk about games after playing differs from the way they talk about it while they are playing. It's not that they lie or are forgetful, but that the post hoc discussion is essentially a "reconstruction" of an event that leaves out potentially important aspects of their experience.

The book builds on the work of many game researchers in the field. It is also interdisplinary in its approach, drawing in research in sociology, anthropology, computer science, human-computer interacton, linguistics, and educational game research. I hope this research appeals to anyone in the field of games research. If you happen to read it, I look forward to any feedback and criticism you may have.

You can find the book at the publisher's site (http://www.peterlang.com/?310905) or at Amazon.com.

You can also find a sample chapter at: http://bit.ly/j3VYYl.

Cultures in Virtual Worlds
A special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Guest-edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Adrienne Massanari

Virtual worlds (VW) embody cultures, their artefacts, and their praxes; these new and old spaces of imagination and transformation allow humans to interact in spatial dimensions. Within these spaces, culture manifests with the creation, representation, and circulation of meaningful experiences.  But virtual worlds are not novel in that regard, nor should we make the mistake to assume that they are novel in themselves.  Virtual experiences have been around in some respect for hundreds of years, and virtual worlds based in information technology have existed for at least 40 years.  The current generation of virtual worlds, with roots over four decades old in studies of virtual reality, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), sociology, cultural studies, and related topics, provide for rich and occasionally immersive environments where people become enculturated within the world sometimes as richly as the rest of their everyday lives.   

We seek research that encounters and investigates cultures in virtual worlds in its plurality and in its richness.   To that end, we invite papers covering the breadth of the topic of cultures in and of virtual worlds. 

Some possible areas/approaches of inquiry:

1. How culture of virtual worlds affect relationships
2. VW interfaces and culture/s
3. Hidden subcultures/communities in virtual worlds
4. Ages and VW cultures
5. Emic and etic experiences of virtual worlds
6. Producing VW cultures
7. Traditional cultural/critical studies inquiries of VWs
8. Transnational or cosmopolitan cultures in/of VWs

While all forms of scholarship and research are welcome, we prefer theoretically and empirically grounded studies. We seek a Special Issue that exemplifies methodological pluralism and scholarly diversity. The use of visual evidence and representations is also encouraged.   We especially seek pieces that investigate virtual worlds that have received little scholarly attention.

Submission guidelines

This special issue is Guest-Edited by Jeremy Hunsinger (Virginia Tech) and Adrienne Massanari (Loyola University Chicago). Queries regarding the Special Issue should be directed to them at jhuns@vt.edu and amassanari@luc.edu. The Guest-Editors welcome contributions from both new researchers and those who are more well-established. Submitted manuscripts will be subject to peer review.

Length of papers will vary as per disciplinary expectations, but we encourage articles of around 7000 words (longer articles may be possible, if warranted). Short discussion papers of around 3000 words on relevant subjects are also welcomed as 'Technical Notes'. Detailed author submission guidelines are available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1361-4568&linktype=44.

Papers must be submitted via the journal’s online submissions system: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tham Please indicate that your submission is for the Special Issue on Culture in Virtual Worlds.

The special issue will be published in summer 2012.

Important dates:

• November 11, 2011: Paper submission deadline
• February 10, 2012: Author notification
• May 5, 2012: Final copy due          
• Summer 2012: Publication

Although I missed a significant portion of the conference, I have some thoughts to share:

• Hall of Failure: It's a near unanimous consent that this is a great addition to this conference, and a feature that other conferences--large or small--could benefit from. These are panels that focus specifically on "failures," however you choose to interpret it. The scholars were all refreshingly and brutally honest about why their attempts failed and it was a great opportunity for them to share their learning with the audience. As all researchers know, things can and do go wrong, but we almost never come out and admit it. Instead, we'd rather glean through all the successful moments and focus on that. Not only does that skew the results, that's a lost opportunity to learn from our mistakes. The session I attended included talks by Mark Chen, Eric Klopfer, Jason Haas, Lindsay Grace, and Carlton Reeve. If I had to pick one aspect of GLS 7.0 that I enjoyed the most, it would be this.
• Gamification: I missed the main talk on gamification, but from what I can tell, there are mixed feelings about its merits. I still need to read more about this in order to comment intelligently on it, but I gather that one of the reason gamification "works" is that it doesn't really do any harm. In other words, it's likely that 90% of the time it does nothing for the learner, and 10% of the time it motivates those who are already motivated; but it never really causes people to learn less. So, if you only focus on the positive (as many studies do), then it would appear mildly successful. The problem, then, is not with gamification itself, but with people who think that gamification alone is enough. Anyway, I'll have to give this more thought in another post.
• Unexplored tensions: One thing about conferences is that, sometimes, the conversation stops just when it gets interesting because your time has run out and the session is over. Maybe the speakers talk among themselves after, but you're not always privy to those conversations. In this case, I noticed that there were two groups that needed to speak directly with each other: 1) those who found out that hard way that "reality" is boring and cannot be turned into a good game and 2) those who believe that games can teach "reality" (or some aspect of it). To be sure, there's some middle ground. For example, maybe games don't have to reflect reality visually but can still embody some aspect of it, such as some underlying process; but that's a notoriously difficult balance to find. That's probably why it's relatively easier to design a game that teaches real STEM concepts because those are more straightforward to simulate than fuzzy concepts such as "historical thinking." Maybe there should be a session or two that put a practicing teacher, a game designer, a graphic designer and a content expert on the same panel and have them talk directly to each other.
• Conference pampering: GLS is, by far, the only conference that keeps its attendees well-pampered and fed throughout. No brown bag lunches with dried wraps or you're-on-your-own-for-dinner. They treat you like royalty at GLS and it's incredible. Having been to so many conferences, I really appreciate this, and I'm sure the other attendees do as well.

I'm trying to decide whether it's possible to enjoy a game but not actually like it. Rockstar Games has put out some bestselling titles over the years, and L.A. Noire is bound to be a strong Game of the Year contender. But L.A. Noire is a bit like Avatar - you can be dazzled by the visual world you're immersed in if you can also overlook some serious issues.

L.A. Noire has a solid plot. In fact, the narrative is one of the best part of the game, weaving together several storylines in a way that works in a videogame. You play as Cole Phelps, a young detective who moves through different parts of the LAPD, from patrol to traffic, homicide, vice, and arson. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you're on a different side of the law now and you're spending most of your time solving crimes. Although it's released by Rockstar, this isn't much of a car chasing game (although there are a few of those); the key game mechanic here is using your intuition to solve crimes.

Simuliating human behavior

Which comes to the trickier and most ambitious part of the game: simulating human communication. The game used motion capture technology to capture minute details of the actors' facial expressions, including eye contact, body language, gestures, and other facial expressions. There are two problems I have with their approach. The first is the assumption that people who lie don't look you in the eye and start to fidget more, and that people who are telling the truth give you a steady gaze. Most of you should realize that this is already a problematic assumption because different cultural groups have different feelings about eye contact, and much of it also depends on individual differences. The second problem is what you have to do after you detect lying. During interrogation scenes, you have three choices to make: 1) Truth, 2) Doubt, and 3) Lie. When you select "Truth," you're assuming that the witness or suspect is being truthful and you move on with your questions. When you select "Doubt," you believe the suspect is holding something back but you don't have the evidence to argue that. When you select "Lie," you know the suspect is lying and you have the evidence to prove it. The problem with the third choice is having to connect the lie to a piece of evidence. This is done by going through your notebook's list of evidence and picking one that you can use as "proof." The game doesn't clearly tell you what can be used as proof so it's up to the player to decide that. Of course, the game designers have in their mind what is the right answer, so it's up to you to guess what's on their minds.

For me, the challenge wasn't between identifying who's telling the truth; the game makes that pretty straightforward. The challenge was between the oftentimes arbitrary distinctions between "Doubt" and "Lie," and between what the game designers have decided to be evidence of lying. At times, it's like trying to do a really bad multiple choice test, where you're punished for thinking too much.

One thing that I wished the game designers hadn't done is to tell you how many questions you got right. Initially, that made me want to get all the answers right and, when I got frustrated by the arbitrariness of the questions, I was tempted to look them up on the Internet. Fortunately, I didn't 'cause that started to take the fun out of the game even more, so I just let myself go with my instincts, even if that meant getting more answer wrong. One other thing is that, despite being a key innovation in the game, the interrogations actually don't matter. In other words, you could get every question wrong and that still doesn't stop you from moving forward in the game. You might get yelled at and your rank might rise more slowly, but none of that really matters. Rank means nothing in the game. You don't get more or less respect, better or worse weapons, smarter or dumber partners. Rank, which is a bit like "experience" in roleplaying games, is meaningless beyond adding trivial things such as the ability to change into a different suit.

Having finished the game, I've developed mixed feelings about it. Anyone who tries to use this game to "teach" human communication would be very naive and misguided because the game oversimplifies it to a comical degree. At the same time, the game was a lot of fun and, short of a few silly plot holes, was quite enjoyable to play. I fully expect a follow-up to the game and perhaps the game designers could polish up some of the game mechanics in that one. For now, I can only say that L.A. Noire is one of the most beautiful and ambitious game I've played and just barely missd its target.

JIT is a concept that originated in the business world, specifically in operations management. It was developed to keep down inventory costs. Instead of preordering components from a supplier and holding them in your inventory, your operations management system would demand the components from a supplier only when a customer asks for it. That way, you don't need to hold components in your inventory that you might not use, hence keeping costs down. Information is given to the supplier "just-in-time" and the component is sent over.

(There are problems with JIT, even within the business world context. I've talked to people who work in inventory control. They tell me JIT often doesn't work as well as it looks in theory. It's more of an ideal, like "360 assessment" and other business world concepts. Also, JIT does not protect you from price fluctuations or sudden supply shortages.)

In video games, JIT learning is reinterpreted to describe what happens in tutorials. When a player starts a game, they spend the first 10-15 minutes figuring how how the game works, where the menus are, what the icons mean, how to walk, shoot, run, hide, communicate, and so on. Video games don't ask you to memorize all the moves before playing. Instead, it tells you what moves you can make when you need to make them. This is easier for the player because action in games are performed through abstract combinations of buttons, so you need to have that kind of situated instruction to prevent the game from becoming overwhelming.

From an educational point of view, the concept of "JIT learning" is a great piece of marketing because it borrows a phrase from the "real" business world and connects it to learning. It brings together "learning," "21st century skills," and "new economy," and it juxtaposes JIT learning with all the other forms of non-JIT learning perpetuated in schools. It's a great metaphor to use because it makes people go "Of course, JIT is great. How can it not be?" But things that make so much sense on the surface often hide underlying issues, so let's open the black box and take a peek.

Overly vague

The business world is ripe with phrases like "just-in-time" that sound "necessarily good." It's like calling something "people-centered" or "pro-society" or "learning-centered." It uses a description that seems so obviously good that it defies criticism, and that's precisely my concern about it.

When educators talk about JIT learning, they almost never elaborate on whether they are suggesting that JIT learning is just as effective or more effective as non-JIT learning, and they almost never explain "just in time for what?" Do they mean that JIT learning is the best kind of learning, and that schools should do away with non-JIT learning? Are there situations where non-JIT learning works better than JIT learning?

I can appreciate the benefits of JIT learning. It's annoying to memorize things that you might not need in the future. (Interestingly, I just found out that there's research suggesting that there are neurological benefits to learning things you don't need to use immediately because it wires your brain to be prepared for different forms of thinking. If that's true, that certainly complicates the issue for proponents of JIT learning.) At the same time, people engage in non-JIT learning all the time, such as when they read a history book for their own benefit. I don't need to use that historical information for anything beyond my own personal interest and it doesn't mean I'm not learning anything. I could just be interested in reading about the Battle of Thermopylae because it fascinates me. I might never need to use that knowledge for anything, but I'm still learning.

So, does JIT mean "just in time to solve the problem at hand" or "just in time when I'm interested?" Those are not the same question. I might have a problem at hand that I have no interest in solving. I can also be interested in something that doesn't pose a particular problem to me. If I pose to you a problem that you have little interest in solving, and give you all the JIT instruction you need, would it still be as effective? In other words: Is JIT learning in games effective simply because players are interested in playing the game and not because there's something inherently well-designed about a JIT form of instruction? I don't know the answer to this question, so someone should investigate it. For example, try putting a non-player in front of a video game and see how effective JIT learning is.

Often doesn't work

I came across the flaws of JIT learning in my own research. It's too much to explain in a blog, but this is basically what happened: a novice was asking for help on how to do something in a game, the other players provided her the instructions, but she remained confused and frustrated. The instructions were accurate, reasonably clear (to the extent that "Press A" is clear), and provided when she asked for it. But it didn't work? Why not? It was JIT!

It didn't work because JIT doesn't say anything about what form that instruction comes in, nor does it say anything about what that information is. There are times when it's easy to give someone an instruction on something. "To jump over the gap, press A" is a perfectly easy and JIT form of instruction. But learning isn't always that simple; in fact, it seldom is. Learning also isn't always just about information, it's about what you do with that information, how you relate it to other pieces of information, and how you can assess its accuracy.

The Internet is our most abundant source of JIT information. We can go on a search and find any information we want. But from my experience with students, knowing how to find information "just in time" is not the same as knowing how to assess the value of that information. In games, we trust that game designers will give us the right instruction (although wouldn't it be fun if they didn't?) so we never have to worry about accuracy. But in the real world, we need to decide for ourselves what to do with information.

As educators know, timing is important in learning. We talk about "teachable moments" when they come up, and we try to grasp those moments and use them to clarify a point. JIT focuses on two important aspects of learning (timing and information) but not on context and other big picture questions. For example, "To jump over the gap, press A" only tells me how to jump, it doesn't tell me why I have to jump, why I can't go down the gap, why is the gap so terrifying, why can't I go back, and so on. It just tells me to blindly follow the (often arbitrary) rules of a game. JIT typically does not provide answers to these larger questions, just the immediate, practical ones.

Traditional teaching methods have been getting a bad rap for presenting students with information that they don't need to use. Why do we neet to learn things like the quadratic equation, the Battle of Hastings, the periodic table, the volume of a sphere, the meaning of a metaphor, if we don't know whether we ever need it? JIT learning fixes that problem by putting students into situations when they do have to use them to solve problems. That is, no doubt, a step in the right direction. But before we get too carried away with it, let's stop for a moment and study JIT learning more deeply. Because, if you've ever played a video game in your life, I'm willing to bet that you were given an instruction that made you go "Wait, what?" Learning in games is not flawless. We can understand it better if we're willing to look at counter-examples (i.e., when JIT learning fails). We also need to teach students how to assess the JIT information because JIT learning in the real world isn't as straightforward as it is in the gaming world. We also need to stop glossing over JIT and start elaborating on it further. We'll be doing a great disservice to education if we elevate JIT to a level beyond critical investigation.

The title of the book derives from the notion that "glamour" and "grammar" had once been the same word. "Grammar" had to do with learning and "glamour" had to do with enchantment (as in spells). They diverged in their meaning over time, and Clark attempts to bring back their original meanings by suggesting that there is something quite powerful in using language correctly, even if it means fussing over some of the finer details.

The book is organized into five parts, going from the word-level to the semantic (meaning) level, all the while covering topics such as punctuation, common spelling mistakes, sentence structure, and etymology. Each chapter is short and readable and written with great wit. The chapters also end with a "Keepsakes" section that summaries the key points to each chapter. They also serve as ways in which you can check on whether you're using the right word, punctuation, sentence structure, and so on in your writing choices.

What's great with this book in particular is that it covered punctuation, which is a topic that many grammar books tend to skip. The textbook I use The Grammar Book by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman, perhaps because it's not regarded as a central grammar topic per se, especially since punctuation wasn't invented till much later. But having done some scholarly writing myself, I appreciated having a consistent source for finding out minor (but important) rules about where to place certain punctuation marks, and their intended effects in the sentence. Commas remain a persistent issue; I tend to place them at points where others want to take it out, and it looks like I was often right in my choices.

It was also nice to know the names of certain things, such as "left-branching sentences" (which has to do with the number of words you put between your subject and verb). One problem with writing is that people have the tendency to feel that the more complex and difficult to understand your writing is, the smarter you come across or the better your writing would appear. Clark does not agree with this (nor do I) and he suggests how you can ease the load on your reader while also making your point clear. That is to say, you can write in ways that are easy to understand and still be sophisticated in your content is sophisticated. If you have to confound your audience by writing poorly structured sentences, then you're not being a good writer.

I appreciate that Clark drew from a variety of sources for his examples, including plays, reports, novels, history books, TV shows, newspapers, journals, and so on. This really expands the applicability of his suggestions, making it useful on many levels, for many audiences.

It's a great book for beginner and experts alike, and perfect for a class on language, grammar and communication.

I had always like Kurt Squire's (2006) differentiation between "endogenous" and "exogenous" games, where endogenous games are games that marry form with content, such that by playing the game and learning its rules, you are also understanding the content of the game. Exogenous games, on the other hand, are games that have content that are external to its rules--Jeopardy, Trivial Pursuit--most games that teachers are likely to use in the classroom because they are easy to integrate into a lesson and reused for other content. The idea is that endogenous games are better if you want to teach systems thinking because it requires players to understand how the rules work in relation to their actions in the game.

I would've loved to design an endogenous game for the linguistics class, but there weren't enough students. On top of that, I wouldn't be sure how to begin exactly, although I have some ideas--for example, having students think of themselves as a part of the structure of the sentence and have them bond with each other. In any case, I would've needed a lot more students than what I had, so I had to use games in other ways.

In my first class, I had them play some board games. I have some "serious" board games that they were not likely to have played before (i.e., it wasn't Monopoly, Life, or Clue). I had them look at the rules and then observed what they did with it. Afterwards, I drew the analogy that understanding the grammatical rules to the language is kind of like understanding the rules of a game; that is, you don't have to be an expert and memorize all the rules, but you need to know enough of them to play it. (This analogy would be for students who don't feel that it makes sense to teach grammar explicitly.)

I had to teach the same course again this year, and I did the same thing. The students were surprisingly engaged with the game--called Lifeboats--which is a diplomacy game somewhat similar to Survivor, where you have to vote someone off rapidly sinkiing lifeboats. The students got the concept really fast. They were initially frustrated by the rules, and couldn't understand it without playing the game. Some students wanted to get all the rules right first time, others just wanted to jump in. And they got the analogy right away--that their students are likely to feel the same frustration when it comes to learning a new language.

I also had some games--endogenous, alas--where they competed to draw accurate grammar trees of sentences they would pick out. I had them play in teams, so that their teammates could call out to another who is drawing the actual trees. I also had them make trees from famous movie lines (e.g., "I could have been a contender," "You will go to the Dagobah system"), and they seemed to get a kick out of that as well. The result was quite surprising as well. I heard things like "that prepositional phrase is an adverbial, not part of the verb phrase," and "there's no future tense; that's a modal." Although it wasn't an exogenous game, the motivation to compete got them to think critically in terms of how to get the right answers. The collaboration served as a way for them to think aloud to one another, and for me to assess whether they were getting the concepts right or whether they were just randomly drawing things on the board. Over a very short period of time, I saw substantial growth, especially among students who had been intimidated by the idea of grammar trees in the beginning.

I also introduced a role called the saboteur, in part because I have an odd number of students and it makes it hard to have balanced teams. The saboteur would be someone who deliberately gives misinformation by providing wrong answers, so the team members would have to be able to identify what are wrong suggestions and figure out who the saboteur is. This would stop them from passively agreeing with whatever is being suggested, and also helps them identify errors in a more active way. To make things even more interesting, I'm going to have them switch up so that the role changes every five rounds. In some rounds, there might be no saboteur. The team members who correctly identifies the saboteur will earn an extra amount of points.

So, I don't think exogenous games is all bad news. More often than not, it's lazy because they're easy to use, and you don't need to spend a lot of time elaborating the rules. (My games often end up having too many rules, in part because the students encourage complicated moves and countermoves.) If the games give students time to reflect on thelr learning in ways that would otherwise be awkward, I think it has its advantages.

References

Squire, K. (2006). From content to context: Videogames as designed experience. Educational Researcher, 35(8), 19-29.