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For the past few months I have been working on a project in coordination with the Secretary of Technology’s office (yes, Virginia has a Secretary of Technology) to make a series of popular GED programs available to subscribers of digital cable. Previously, these programs, part of the GED Connection series produced by PBS and Kentucky Educational Television, were broadcast, one episode at a time, on PBS stations at odd times–5:30 am on Sunday for example. Now, Cox and Comcast cable subscribers can access all 39 programs anytime they want. The partnership has gotten some good press–pretty unusual, I think, for adult education. Governor Kaine put out a press release and a brief televised promo on the initiative, and the project got some ink from the Richmond Times Dispatch:

The partnership between the Virginia Department of Education, Comcast Cable and Cox Communications was announced yesterday by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine. Nearly one in seven adults over age 18 in Virginia lack a high-school or equivalent diploma, said Julie Grimes, Education Department spokeswoman.

The most common obstacles to getting a GED are scheduling conflicts, transportation to and from classes and lack of availability of child care or the inability to pay for it, experts say. In a statement, Kaine said the on-demand service “provides convenience and flexibility for adults who want to increase their income potential by earning a GED.”

On-demand adds to the ways people can study for GED certification and builds on the state’s Race to GED program, said Randall Stamper, communications specialist at the education department’s adult education office. Race to GED seeks out folks who may need just to brush up on certain skills before testing, to help them earn certification faster.

People can take classes at adult learning centers, cram via the Web or watch scheduled programs on Public Broadcasting Service stations. The on-demand option lets people watch half-hour lessons — 39 of them — at any time.

Of course, not all adults in need of a GED subscribe to digital cable, but at least this project makes these programs available to those that do. And hopefully the success of this partnership will lead to other coordinated projects between adult education and the business community

Author and prominent games & learning researcher James Paul Gee wrote an article called “What Would a State of the Art Instructional Video Game Look Like?” In the article Gee argues that many off the shelf commercial games are already state of the art learning games, citing as an example Full Spectrum Warrior. His argument is that the learning is already there, in what he calls the game’s “authentic professionalism.” So, even though players are playing a game, shooting enemies, etc., on a deeper level they are building expertise in a specific knowledge domain, learning how to behave, how to communicate, and what skills are important.

Could we ask the same hypothetical question about Alternate Reality Games? For a player fully engaging in the activities of a well-designed ARG, I think there is a similar “authentic professionalism’ taking place. Players need to contact and negotiate with the larger community that develops around the game. They need to investigate the boundaries of the game space, recognize a domain of knowledge to which they might contribute. Players need to help establish, or at least learn, the communication rules that form around the gameplay, etc. Useful stuff, if you ask me.

To play a video game, a player has to actually sit down, joystick or computer keyboard in hand, and turn it on. Otherwise, nothing happens. Not so for an ARG. The game play in an ARG is driven partly by the designers, and, perhaps more importantly, partly by the active participation of the players. In many ARGs, there are many players who sit by the sidelines, lurking, joining in only rarely, or they participate for social rather than ludic reasons. For this reason, game play in an ARG can be fairly hierarchical, with much of the game being advanced by a small number of intensely active players, are supported by a larger group of less committed, more casual players. These player participation levels move outward, in concentric rings, until you get to the far-flung players who play peripherally and rarely contribute.

While the individual path of a video game differs from player to player, the overall experience is the same. Most importantly, there is a reset button. The ARG experience is always going to differ from player to player, depending on how much he or she participates. And if individual players decide not to play, too bad. There is no reset button. The game continues.

To implement an ARG in a formal educational environment, everyone must participate at some level. If there are serious learning objectives to achieve, gameplay can’t be optional. So, unlike Full Spectrum Warrior or Civilization, the learning in an ARG is not found in some separate game structure but is distributed throughout the community of players.

So, for me, the question remains: what would an educational ARG look like?

to be continued…

VCU continues its Creating and Consuming Culture in the Digital Age lecture series, kicking off the spring schedule on February 6th with a Roundtable discussion on blogging in the arts and humanities. Guest bloggers include Charles Bernstein, founder of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY—Buffalo, Tyler Green, editor and writer for the Modern Art Notes blog, and Dan Cohen, Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Three men, zero women, by the way, a fact that would be of interest to Kathryn Hayles, author of My Mother was a Computer and Hillis Professor of Literature and Media Arts at UCLA. She will talk on Gender in Cyberspace on February 26th. On April 11, the lecture series ends with a collaboratively edited bang flourish whimper “conversation” with Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia.

One of the reasons I created this blog was to establish a place to warehouse my thoughts on my research, namely educational alternate reality games (ARGs), virtual learning environments (such as Second Life), and participatory media and its possibilities for learning. During the day my concerns mostly involve the political, financial and technical minutiae of setting up a web-based learning program for adults, and I get little time to think about other things. Don’t get me wrong: while adult basic education can be very different from K12 and post-secondary learning, in many ways I think it could benefit from being included in the conversation on using such novel approaches as games and virtual worlds in the classroom. But the field of adult education is, I am sorry to say, a technological backwater. There are reasons for this: adult ed is typically the red-headed stepchild of K12 programs, and there aren’t enough full-time teaching or administrative positions to make it an attractive career option for younger (and more innovative) teachers. Typically, adult ed teachers work as K12 teachers during the day, or are retired K12 teachers. Also there isn’t much money to invest in technology. So, there are so many more basic, proven technological innovations that need to be incorporated into adult ed that considering something like Second Life or an ARG would just be too much of a jump forward.

Perhaps I am wrong about this. But when I suggest looking more closely at these new tools during meetings with my colleagues, who, compared to much of the field, are pretty forward-thinking, technologically, I get a pretty tepid response.

Well, I will have time to devote some more thought to my research when I formally begin working part-time next week. In preparation for this, I have been making contact with many of the people active in the ARG community about my interest in studying the use of ARGs for pedagogical purposes. Everyone has been very encouraging, and very enthusiastic about this topic. Especially helpful was the release of the ARG Sig Whitepaper on ARGs. There was an entire section of ARGs in academia, both as a topic of study and a tool being used to teach. But I can’t seem to find anyone currently using (or planning to use) an ARG in this way. I have also been making connections with folks on the campus where I work (VCU) to propose creating an independent study ARG design class to create an educational ARG. There has been nominal interest, but not enough for any signatures to be applied to the necessary forms to make it happen in the next year.

As I am able to spend more time tracking possible research subjects, perhaps I will have more luck finding someone (anyone) producing an ARG with some kind of pedagogical goal.

Although as of this writing the news has not been posted to Curry’s website, the Richmond Times-Dispatch today reports that Black Entertainment Television founder Sheila Johnson has written a $5 million check to UVA’s Curry School of Education, where I am (still) a graduate student. This is on top of a massive gazillion dollar donation 2 years ago which is being used to construct a new building for the school (and demolish and salt the earth a la Cathage of Ruffner, a windowless, brick atrocity plunked down among UVA’s neo-classical buildings that currently houses Curry). According to the T-D:

Sheila C. Johnson, a philanthropist and businesswoman, will donate $5 million to the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, sources confirmed today.

A member of the school’s foundation, Johnson, who lives in Northern Virginia, will target the contribution primarily to finance clinics to help children with psychological disorders that impede their learning.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and Johnson, the biggest contributor to the governor’s successful campaign, will announce the establishment of the new U.Va. center at a press conference tomorrow in Capitol Square in Richmond.

Here is a video I found on the Serious Games site. The video was produced by the Orange County Department of Education and includes interviews with Clarke Aldrich, James Paul Gee and Henry Jenkins who were all keynote speakers at the SGS 06 conference. Damn, wish I had been there.

BTW, the video contains 20 minutes of blisteringly fine academic geekiness. Consider yourself warned.
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=6117726917684965691&hl=en” width=”400″ height=”326″/]

This game (www.gamedesign.jp/flash/worldmap/worldmap.html) still seems a bit klugey–it is hard to easily zoom in and out while you are playing the timed game–but it is a fun way to bone up on geography. I have been fascinated by maps since I was young, plastering my bedroom walls with the maps that came with National Geographic magazine. So I thought I would be pretty good at this game right off the bat. That is until I was stumped by countries like the Kyrgyz Republic and Eritrea. Only 25% correct? Ouch.

My scores have improved significantly after a few tries. If you want to practice, just click around on the map without clicking Start. The names of the countries you select will appear at the bottom of the screen.

I have had a brief email exchange with Bryan Alexander today, who works at NITLE, an organization I haven’t come across before but, from an initial look at their site, seems to do some interesting work.

Bryan, like others I have recently contacted about my interest in studying the educational potential of ARGs, thinks using ARGs in this way is a good idea, but doesn’t know of anyone actually doing it, at least on a regular basis.
Still, this is another interesting resource.