I don’t typically go on rants here on the blog. I’ve occasionally voiced frustration about political developments, subpar video sharing sites dedicated to education, or questioned the heralding of large Bill Gates-backed video learning projects, but when it comes to calling out other education blogs, I’m typically quiet. Why? Well, for starters, it usually invites a host of negative or critical comments on my own work, which engenders the type of "sour grapes" responses that make me look jealous of others’ success. This in turn can make it quite easy for anyone, close colleagues and acquaintances included, to conclude that Ben Rimes is a rather crotchety, pessimistic, jerk that would rather whine about others than rise to the occasion. I suppose that today, I’ll have to accept those likely outcomes, as this weekend a number of musings, thoughts, and ramblings came together for me. Here are a few of my growing concerns with the mainstream education blogging space. My concerns about mainstream education blogs aren’t really alarmist. They’re more like, "should there really be aloe flavored yogurt?" Drinking From the Firehose is Apparently the Popular Choice I get listed on some of the spammy/SEO-like posts put out by various entities that go by titles that are all basic permutations and assemblages of the words "College, Online, Best, Helper, Ranking, Success". When I browse through those lists there are a lot of great reflective blogs, and each list seems to be slightly different as times passes. There are a few blogs though that seem to seize an inordinate chunk of the edublogger zeitgeist; the blogs that have anywhere between 5 to 15 posts a day, and average no more than one or two paragraphs per posting. They’re the kind of blogs that value quantity over quality, seem to garner a hefty amount of Tweets, Pins, and Facebook postings, and yet when you visit them they seem like little more than rehashed press releases with little to no value added. Don’t get me wrong, everyone needs to drink from the firehose every now and then after stumbling across the digital wastelands of the internet, but when the first comments on your blog post are basically commenting on how poor the service you’re mentioning is, and can only say "it’s a start I suppose", maybe you should step back and take a bit more time digging into the content you’re posting, and turn that firehose into a manageable garden spigot better suited to cultivating and feeding reflective learning. Back Patting is Great, But We Need to Grow Many blog posts I see bouncing around the Twittersphere are usually high spirited "Huzzah-inducing happy posts". There’s nothing wrong with that, and certainly we need to share some positivity, but I don’t see a lot of the good critical stuff happening in smaller circles in the wider mainstream education blogs. Tom Woodward is probably my best example of how to "Lose Friend and Alienate People" when it comes to regular critical blog posts that might contain explicit lyrics or criticisms of large corporations taking over education. Tom usually makes some pretty great reflective critical comments where others dare not (myself included mostly) when it comes to accurately pointing out what we should really be focused on in education. I love the great big circle hugs, inside jokes, and support that most educational circles on Twitter and Facebook provide for one another (we need it for the most part after the societal and cultural lumps that we take far too often). However, when it’s time to really grow as individuals and professionals, I can’t seem to recall the last time I created lasting growth and deeper understanding by a round of "good jobs". In fact, feel free to use this blog post as a way to tell me what I’m doing wrong, and call me out on a number of topics. I’ve been down that road before and when someone like David Warlick calls you out on your published thoughts in a national magazine, once you get passed the wincing and wound-licking you have a great opportunity to emerge stronger and more thoughtful. EduPreneurs Make Me Leary I come from a long time on entrepreneurs. My father, his father before him, his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father (you get the point) were all independent business men at some point in their lives. Among various dalliances with side businesses and sales jobs, my family had a small department store for over 100 years before it finally closed its doors at the turn of the millenium. I grew up in the world of retail, service, independent entrepreneurship, and sales. I don’t have anything against people wanting to carve out a successful business for themselves on the merit of their own experiences, wisdom, and talents, but I do know this from my own family’s experiences; being a successful entrepreneur means that you look for opportunities, some more opportunistic than others, about how to grow your business. It doesn’t matter how much you might profess your dedication to helping students, teachers, and education in general, eventually the bottom line is going to take hold in some small way. I’m not trying to be pessimistic or cynical in this, just pragmatic…I’ve seen it happen all too often. Granted there are great examples of educators taking the EduPreneur route and sticking to a more altruistic over tones. Prominent edu-blogger Dan Meyer has managed to do this with his 101qs site revolving around making math instruction better. I just begin to develop that sense of distrust when a prominent blogger or education thinker starts to evangelize one particular learning/technology platform over another, then discover that they also happen to be heavily invested in developing applications or tools for that particular platform. Those Fancy Infographics Are Just Posters, And They’re Getting Worse Once upon a time, infographics used to be really cool (hilarious, but don’t open that link while working with students). Many are a nice blend of humor, play on cultural references, and actually use the graphical elements to make an emphatic point about the data. Sadly, most of the infographics I see getting posted on many mainstream education blogs are the equivalent of graphic design sweat shops that don’t exactly create strong visual references or elements that help tie all of the data together in a cohesive piece of art. They’re more like posters 2.0, and for the vast majority of infrographic publishing PR firms, there’s nothing amazing going on here. It’s an epidemic actually, spurred on by many of those link-bait sites I mentioned in concern number one; they must have this nice email list that they share with one another containing several hundreds, if not thousands, of regular education bloggers asking for "guest" posts, and suggestions of infographics to share, because I seem them tend to pop up in small clusters. Oh, and those really cool tools that let you create your own visually stunning info graphics? Those aren’t infographics, they’re just graphs….with the added detriment of having to scroll through them to see everything. Sharing Corporations & Products More Than Student Work & Lessons Learned This could very well be my biggest beef with many mainstream education blogs. While I have certainly been guilty of sharing products over process, the general rise in the number of blogger-turned-product-placement-professionals is a bit unnerving. Not that the blogosphere is in danger of becoming overrun with legions of consumer-level PR machines, but as more and more bloggers receive complimentary gadgets, accounts, and services from a variety of corporations, it can become increasingly difficult to tell if they really value the product, or are just moving onto their next sweet deal. Are people writing about the gallon of IdeaPaint they picked up because they bought it themselves, and they’re really enjoying it, or did they receive a complimentary gift to try it out, write about their experience, and then moved on to something else that caught their attention? It’s not that I have a problem with this, as I’ve received a number of pretty sweet deals throughout my blogging tenure, but my concern is what happens when the majority of mainstream education blogs become nothing more than just another media channel for corporations to push their wares? There aren’t any terribly bad culprits of this that I can callout; it’s more of a general warning to any mainstream education blogger. If you’re writing more and more about amazing products and services, and less about actual instruction, student experiences, and something that adds to the educational world without having to purchase it for $29.99, you might have tilted the scales a bit too far. So What Now, Ben? Remember how I said I don’t do this sort of thing very often? It’s because while I like to sound off quite frequently in face-to-face conversations and forum posts (some might say I have a rather stand-offish attitude at times), I like to make sure that when I take the time to write, share my feelings, and actually try to put some prosaic words in a little text-box, I have some type of reflective after note. In this case, my response to these concerns is actually rather simplistic, and in a way I hope might deflect any of those negative comments that I’m sure some might be more than willing to share. I did link directly to a few examples of blog posts that concern me, and it would certainly be easy for me to say "start reading my blog!" as a response, it’s not how I feel. My blog is certainly not intended to be mainstream about anything, and as I mentioned earlier,  I notice some of the growing issues out there happening in my own blogging as well. I would strongly encourage anyone with an RSS Reader (people still use RSS, right?) to check out a few blogs that are both well established in educational thought, and do a wonderfully profound job of being reflective, adding to the rich narrative of teacher and students voices here on the internet, and are being written first and foremost for the author. Alan Levine, Audrey Watters, and James Paul Gee are just a few to get you started. The way they write is often profoundly simple, and while they may ramble on in comparison to the typical "10 sentence maximum" blog posts on many heavily trafficked education blogs, their writing represents the kind of reflection, introspection, and self curation that I wish more educators and students could develop. In an era when so many are caught up in MOOCs, Alan is willing to openly question the very foundation of why we need to have courses at all. Audrey describes the most amazingly detailed "test" that she runs through when meeting with new EduPreneurs, and short of giving them a long form essay question on the history of educational theory, she lays out a number of critical questions that I rarely see many popular education bloggers postulating of the services, products, and individuals they’re talking about. Heck, I know I’d fail if I ever found myself on the receiving end of many of those questions. Mr. Gee has led me to believe that a lot of educators talking about Gamification in the classroom are going about it all wrong. There are certainly hundreds upon thousands upon millions of great educational voices out there in the world, and my hope is that those fortunate enough to be competing for the most mind share of classroom teachers are being good stewards in their position of prominence.  

The PBS IdeaChannel is my new favorite YouTube addiction. Imagine taking everything thought provoking that PBS hangs its hat on, and wrap it up with nostalgia for the 80s and 90s, and you have the social media makings of PBS 2.0, designed for my generation.. For example, let’s compare Santa to Hulk Hogan shall we? Yes, yes, the premise sounds far fetched, but the way the persuasive piece of storytelling connects the emotions and cognitive awareness of the "buy in" to the "fakeness" that is Santa Claus and the professional wrestling world is almost magic. I can’t help but wonder what big educational thinkers behind the Common Core State Standards might think about such a seemingly well structured thesis, especially as persuasive writing seems to be so dominant throughout the CCSS language. Having seen a few more Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium assessment examples that include students being able to assemble a persuasive and supportive argument after watching a brief video, participating in class discussion, and then reading two articles, I wonder how well we’re preparing out students to "decode" and comprehend media like this. It’s not exactly as easy as doing some text coding, or applying other forms of written writing comprehension skills. If I were still in the classroom, especially at the secondary level (because who wants to ruin Santa Claus for a bunch of 3rd graders), I would certainly consider using media like this to start exposing my students to the sort of persuasive digital media pieces that they could potentially be creating.

It’s official, the ds106 GIF Fest is upon us! Just in time for the coming Mayan apocalypse no less, huzzah! I thought I’d set the bar really low, to see if I can anger the GIF gods to come and make something better. That, and I thought it might be nice to create a GIF that many of my educational technology brothers and sisters could use in a pinch to illustrate the frustrating nature that is the 21st century work place; we seem like we’re all in a hurry to get somewhere (usually collaboratively, reflectively, and in a standards-based fashion), but we just can’t seem to get there. It’s like we’re all in a hurry to wait for the next thing, which of course how I felt when I saw that pulsating blue progress bar today as I copied over a bunch of videos from around campus to turn into some teacher introductions. Our teachers and school board members don’t often get a chance to meet with one another (typically our principals present to the school board about what’s happening in their buildings), so last year I helped craft a few videos to present some of our "tech leaders" to the school board. It’s been awhile since I’ve done any, and I thought it might be time to pick it back up as we have some new school board members after the election last Fall.

You get at least one of these children in your classroom every year; the overactive student. He or she is that one child that makes the Energizer Bunny look like Droopy the Dog. If you’re quick witted, and a bit lucky, you can usually figure out what makes that particular student tick, and find ways to channel and harness that extra energy for productive work in the classroom. Some days you’re not so successful, and you wind up with what I can only describe as a "Pinkie Pie Tornado". Alright, so maybe you don’t equate your student’s behavior to My Little Pony characters…..but if you did, I think Pinkie Pie’s exuberance would make an excellent metaphor for some of the wilder moments that take place in classrooms just a few days before a big holiday break, whether they’re your "easily excitable" students or not. For those educators that might be dealing with such students, feel free to share this GIF with them. It kept my 7 year old daughter enthralled for at least 5 minutes, and the 3 year old put in at least a couple of minutes and a few great guffaws! For all of you young, eager, energy-filled learners, please consider this Pinkie Pie Tornado as a tribute to your boundless vigor. I’ve created it to memorialize your zest and zeal at a time of the year when most of the adults around you would most likely be happy to take a nap right about now.  

In yet another installment of the ds106 GIFfest, I decided to tackle Michael Branson Smith’s animated GIF assignment and produce a Muppet GIF. It was actually pretty easy, as YouTube is overrun with great video clips from both the classic era of the Muppet Show, and the more modern Muppet creations. As soon as I accepted this growing GIF challenge, I knew I wanted to to capture the classic "Kermit arm flail". It’s the perfect spastic out-pouring of pure jubilation, excitement, and energy. I can safely say this uninhibited display of joy is probably happening in a lot of K-12 classrooms across the United States today, as teachers and students brace for the last days before Christmas break. I wonder if college & university professors and students might already be in full on "Kermit arm flail" state, having finished up their finals and enjoying their mid-year break a bit earlier than K-12. Thanks to Tim Owens for giving me the inspiration for a Kermit GIF.  

I wanted to take a moment this evening from all of the animated GIF creations to send warm wishes and good tidings to all of those wonderful people in my life that support me, challenge me, and help me make it through each and every day. From my fantastic co-workers and hard working educators in Mattawan Schools, to my loving family and close friends both near and far, I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas! To my ds106 brothers and sisters, and all of the other incredible educators that I follow on Twitter, thank you for helping shape me as an educator, and may you have a Happy Holidays! To anyone who may be passing by my blog as they stumble across the Internet, I wish you the warmest of Season’s Greetings as well! I felt determined to produce something that would be more than just the usual fluff that I create, and craft something that I could share with everyone regardless of whether they find my ramblings through a web search for educational purposes, entertainment, or out of dumb luck (which we could all use a bit more of, eh?). In honor of this holiday season, and the ongoing ds106 GIF Fest, I hope everyone has a very Merry GIFmas!  

In the midst of the ds106 GIFfest came a flurry of posts from Jim Groom in which he animated some classic Atari 2600 games. His 8-bit Noir was brilliant, comparing Night Driver to the classic black and white film, The Killers. What really got me jonesing pretty bad to create one of my own was his Haunted House GIF. I’m not going to try and pretend that I have the same sort of nostalgia for Atari 2600 games the same way Jim and those a few years older than me do; I was born in 1979, and while my house was filled with bleeps and bloops in the 80s, I played most of the classic Atari games a few years after many of the era experienced these classics during their "first runs". Still, I’d like to think my memories of these 8-bit wonders aren’t any less significant. Missile Command is probably one of the fondest memories of gaming from my formative years. I’ve played it in most of its incarnations, from the Atari 2600 and Macintosh, to the re-imagined versions on the Nintendo Gameboy and even the iOS platform. What makes this game such a memorable piece of my gaming history is the opportunity it gave me to garner a class period free from work and lab write ups in Chemistry. Mr. L had an aging Mac in the corner of his room that had a few graphing applications and some video games, one of which was Missile Command. Having endeared myself to him earlier in the year by memorizing the theme song to the Road Runner Show, he gave me a turn at Missile Command while I waited for a paper to be graded. Not realizing how practiced I was at the game, he turned back towards his desk, leaving me to spend the next 15 minutes blasting nuclear missiles from the digital sky. When he finally realized how much time I had wasted (his fault entirely of course), he tried to kick me off the computer. I invoked his unofficial "but I haven’t died yet" rule, which gave him pause. Would he risk losing his status of the coolest science teacher in school by kicking a kid off the computer despite having all my work mostly done, or let me continue to monopolize the machine? His solution was rather brilliant; he taped a piece of paper over the top half of the screen, and grinned at me. "Go ahead and see how well you do now, Rimes", he challenged me. Thinking he had gotten the better of me, and that I would soon be dead, he called over a few other students to see how long it would take me before I choked. 5 minutes later I was still blasting away, and in a fit of annoyance, Mr. L lowered the paper so only the bottom third of the screen was visible, making it impossibly difficult to catch all of the missiles before they hit. I shifted strategies from the typical "high orbit intercept strikes" to defending just a few cities. I watched a couple go up in nuclear flames, the millions of virtual inhabitants turned into casualties of war, and feverishly watched for missiles coming towards the two cities closest to the central launch pad. By this time a small gathering of the class was behind me, cheering me on, and eagerly watching both the computer screen and the clock; I had managed to derail any meaning productive work for at least 25 minutes now, and with another 10 minutes of "must defend" mode, I had successfully helped many in the class avoid their work for the better half of the class period. I wish I could say how the class period ended; whether I gave up or the pressure of having all of those eyeballs behind me getting the better of my missile-launching trigger finger. I don’t actually recall how the class period ended, but neither I nor anyone else in the classroom got to play any of the games on Mr. L’s old Mac again. I had destroyed his goodwill, and despite enjoying a day without worrying about whether my lab write up fit the proper grading template, I still had to do the work at home that evening. I’d like to think that everyone has a story like this to tell about a teacher they’ve had; a time when you had a chance to "escape" the usual routine of the classroom and steal a moment or two to connect. I had a blast in Mr. L’s class, and despite spending a good half an hour goofing off that day, I did really well in in the Honors Chemistry course. That, and for a nerd like myself, it helped give me a little boost to my ego, something a heck of a lot of teenagers can appreciate.

I’m having a blast with creating GIFs for the ds106 GIFfest, but I’m also enjoying Stella, the excellent Atari 2600 emulator that Jim Groom turned me onto before Christmas. I spent a few good solid hours playing some of my old favorites, including Miner 2049′er (just as difficult as I remember), Moon Patrol, and Missile Command (still as good as I remember). I wanted to create a bunch of separate GIFs from these games to try and capture the twitchy nature of 8-bit gaming, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results.     It was difficult for me to capture a moment in Miner 2049′er that conveyed the strongest memories I have of the game, which would be a still shot of my miner in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the level after falling from a high ledge. I created a GIF of the miner falling to his doom, but I wanted something that worked better as an seamless loop, not just a "restart" and fall. The same goes for the Moon Patrol GIF. I wanted to create a seamless action shot to convey the frenetic "run and gun" that you felt while playing the game. Miner 2049′er and other platformers at least gave you a safe spot to rest or wait until pushing ahead. Moon Patrol was not so nice, as your vehicle pushed forward whether you wanted it to or not, in an endless treadmill of UFOs, pits, and other obstacles. During the creation process I kept thinking about the episode of Futurama in which Fry, a present day schmo transported to the future after being cryogenically frozen, dreams of visiting the moon. His future friends take him to the Moon Park, which turns out to be a huge disappointment for Fry as the moon has been completely "Disneyfied" and turned into a cheesy theme park. The lunar rover ride is on a rail, cotton candy comes in "moon rock" grey, and the most awful form of revisionist history takes place in a riff on the "It’s a Small World" ride; the "Whalers on the Moon" ride presents Moon tourists with what is believed to be what man’s first trip to the moon looked like, a bunch of drunken sailors with harpoons who have set out to hunt whales on the Sea of Tranquility. The only way to clear my brain out was to create a new ds106 assignment that I’m calling "Animate 2600 Mashup" and take both my Moon Patrol and Miner 2049′er GIFs and cram them together, thus creating "Miners on the Moon". Sure, it’s not quite the same thing as the Futurama joke, but it was a fun remix of the idea.   And because you’ve been a good sport about reading this entire non-education related blog post, I thought I’d at least create a "how to" video on creating an animated GIF using Photoshop and just about any video clip you can get your hands on.

This post is long overdue, as I finished What Video Games have to Teach us About Learning & Literacy by James Paul Gee more than a month ago, along with the other members of Book Club 106. It was a monumental achievement for me personally as I hadn’t ever read an "academic" text outside of required reading for courses. In fact, I haven’t read many books at all outside of required course readings for several years now. Thankfully, there were enough people out there on the Internet to encourage me to get through the heavier early chapters of this book, and finish with a wonderful, if exhaustively long, conclusion about several learning principles that can be derived from good video game design. Before diving into the final wrap up of this work, I wanted to share the two final Google+ Hangout discussions I had with a few more members of Book Club 106. I had to skip a couple of weeks of the video discussions due to a power outage after a wind storm knocked down some lines and some scheduling conflicts, but the next to last discussion with Jim Groom and Patrick Brewer was a satisfying conversation about providing balance in educational spaces between letting learners struggle and when to "step in" to help, and how to create a cohesive narrative in learning and curriculum design akin to game development. Oh, and we talked about some great video games!   The final video discussion for the book was a treat for me because Rachelle Winkoop was finally able to join in for a video discussion after several technology induced mishaps that prevented her from joining in any of the previous discussions. We had the opportunity to talk about teachers needing to "step back" from being the sage on the stage, Montessori education’s place in the 21st century, and come back around to how James Paul Gee recognizes a lot of learning principles inherent in good video game design that can help prepare learners for being life-long learners, not necessarily life-long gamers.   Final Reflection My final thoughts about this text hover around the great question posed by Rachelle in the last video discussion; we learn with much better context as networked learners, not just individuals, so how do we get students to a place where success is defined by being able to ask the right questions, and not just knowing an answer? Being able to simply provide the correct answer on a test or other final assessment piece is not always indicative of success in the real world, outside the confines of our school buildings. In the closing pages of chapter 7, Gee makes point to acknowledge the work of psychologist Lev Vygotsky (a reference I was hoping Gee would make), and his idea of individual’s possessing a "zone of proximal development". This concept is typically essential reading in many teacher prepatory programs (or should be) as it describes that ever-shifting area between the level of accomplishment that an individual can achieve on their own versus the usually much higher level of accomplishment an individual can achieve when working with others. Other important points of the final chapters in this text speak to the growing "connectedness" that many successful emterprises, networks, and schools are beginning to adopt. The rationale that Gee makes for remaining critical and vigilant of patterns of practice that may seem to be successful at first blush, yet fall apart under deeper scrutiny, is a great breath of fresh air in the middle of the digital badges and gamification trends currently happening in many education circles. That’s not to say that I or Gee would necessarily disagree with either of the movements, but that in all areas of education, it’s important to remain reflective, and possess a modicum of self-cognition so as to keep the main goals of a project in constant focus. For example, on page 188 of the book, Gee maintains that although many schools and educational environments may experiment and alter their instructional design to better suit learners, adopting some of the learning principles he’s identified as being more effective than traditional methods, those institutions still cling to traditional assessments and measures of student achievement. This creates a dissonance between how we’re preparing learners to enter the real world, and how they will actually be challenged after their schooling is formally complete. Anyone expecting this text to be a ground-breaking departure from the current learner-focused, problem-based learning movement that’s taking root in many schools in the United States would be disappointed. That’s not to say this isn’t a great read, as I see it as the seminal work behind a lot of game design and gaming as metaphors for effective instructional design and learning. However, either due to the age of the text (it was originally written in 2004), or perhaps the rapidly changing climate of K-12 learning in our hunt for the next "magic bullet", the collected thoughts of James Paul Gee seem rather matter of fact and straightforward. His 36 learning principles are rather concise, and make a lot of sense for any educator that has been wrestling with how to codify a method of successful instructional design. In other words, this is a great comfort read, for me especially on two levels, as I’m both an educator and a gamer. When Gee makes reference to Half-Life 2 I can recall many of the shared experiences he conveys while playing through it. When he makes the connection between the excellent game design that Valve put into Half-Life 2 and the learning environment, it’s done in an elegant manner that makes you realize why you didn’t see the connections before. Any educator that’s serious about their professional practice and gaming should read this book. It’s a little bit of nostalgia mixed with pedagogy, and an affirmation for those teachers looking to develop meaningful connections, collaboration, and reflection among their learners.   Several sticky notes were sacrificed to decoding this worthy text. A Few Thoughts That Stood Out I can’t leave this collection of observations quite yet. While I warmed up to the text as I dug deeper into the chapters, and farther from Gee’s own self authored concept of semiotic domains, I realized a few connections between Gee’s observations and my own personal experiences. Of all the learning theories that Gee described, a few stood for me. These learning principles are the culminating observations of hundreds of hours of both video game play, and studying educational practice. While several describe or re-hash existing learning principles put forth by various psychologists and educational theorists, some bring the uncanny similarities between great game design and great educational design into clear focus.  I jotted a few musings down in the margins and on stickies while reading most of the book (alright, so I heavily butchered the margins and went through nearly an entire pad of sticky notes), but I felt there were a few worth sharing. Learning Principle #27 Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle "The Learner is give explicit information both on demand and just in time, when the leaner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice" Of all the various types of games I enjoy, the Metroid series is probably the best example of this principle. Important tools and resources needed to gain access to higher levels of difficulty or different parts of the game world are earned and discovered as you play through the game. Often areas of extreme importance or interest can be seen just out of reach, making them tantalizing goals with no means of accessing them. Cleverly, the next large boss fight you encounter, or perhaps a newly discovered treasure  will allow you the skills or tools to go back and access that previously unexplored area of the game. Just as in the game, in the classroom learners have access to a host of information, yet often we wait to give them certain tools and resources until we know that they will be able to accomplish learning goals with a higher degree of success. You aren’t given the ability to fire missiles, launch into devastating spin attacks, or double jump early in most Metroid games as the designers want you to explore the tools you do have access to, preserve ammunition, and try to solve problems creatively. As educators, we should be seeking ways to ensure that we aren’t "over-powering" our learners at too early a stage, giving them tools that might hinder them if they haven’t had time to fully understand, appreciate, and master underlying concepts. Learning Principle #30 Cultural Models About the World Principle "Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways." This is probably the most excruciatingly difficult principle for me to put in place. Our ultimate goal as educators is to push learners forward; push them to new understandings, new concepts, and to help them realize that what they can achieve is often limited by their experience, thus seeking out the experiences and wisdom of others can and should be a positive way to grow even farther. However, if we don’t critically examine our own experiences and reflect on them in a constructive way, the introduction of new materials, resources, and concepts can have the adverse effect of destroying the learner’s sense of self-confidence, and possibly even push them farther down a path of self-imposed ignorance. I struggle with this all the time. How do we cheer the ascension of the learner to a new learning goal, yet know that the very next week we’ll be introducing them to concepts and problems that may fly in the face of what they know, potentially reducing what they have learned to nothing more than an exercise in futility. It’s the same concept that applies to a group of individuals playing through a game together, such as an MMO, in which the skills, experience, and resulting accomplishments needed to pass low levels in the game become increasingly irrelevant as you progress to higher levels of difficulty. In other words, rushing head first into a band of Orcs with a battle axe may work when you’re still at a low level, dealing with just a few enemies at a time. However, once the game presents you with magic and long-range weapon wielding enemies, the "berserker" tactic may fail miserably, and you may even have to suffer humiliations in front of your peers as you struggle to adapt and win. I wonder how often I, and other teachers, may be ignoring this crucial principle of supporting learners as they struggle to move from an easier concept to a more difficult one in which earlier experiences no longer apply. One example that comes to mind is trying to apply the previous concept of multiplication as repeated addition to the multiplication of fractions. I haven’t yet figured out a fool-proof method, but I’m a huge fan of reflective journaling (hence my blog), and getting students to narrate how they went about tackling a problem in hopes that the meta-cognition going on will become the focus on the learning experience, not just the achievement at the end.   The "Big" Takeaway I could easily write a dissertation with the mountain of references Gee provides in his text, both from the gaming world and academia. The bibliography pulls from research papers, articles, dissertations, and texts from across three decades of writing and thought, and the gaming references another 2 decades. However, in an effort to find the one "nugget" of an idea that I can take away from this text, I would make reference to a small sentence at the top of page 207 in which Gee is describing the features of an affinity group, a group of individuals with common interests who typically work together to achieve common goals. In addition to pointing out a focus on the "whole process" and access to extensive knowledge that is both embodied in each individual of the group as well as being distributed across the group at large, Gee plainly states that: "Knowledge is not first and foremost in heads, discrete individuals, or books but in networks of relationships"  That’s my takeaway from this text. A simple concept that while I may be merely a node in any network, and while any one individual may find it easy to assess my abilities and value through my ramblings on this blog or my singular efforts in the classroom, they would be underestimating my abilities to accomplish great feats as part of a larger network of learners and educators. As proof of this I would offer up the reality that while most of the videos I create and publish to YouTube garner not more than a few dozen views, it was only after an exhausting two full days of collaborative video editing work with a wide range of teachers, artists, and bloggers that I was able to produce a Back to the Future "Black and White" remix that wound up being featured on several other social media sites, including Gizmodo, and climbed above 100,000 views. My network made that happen, not me.   What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning & Literacy - Part 1   What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning & Literacy - Part 2  

I let myself get caught up with several of the new Google+ Communities over Christmas break. While I’ve mostly been seeing a lot of cross-posting by some of the bigger "ed tech" heavy-weights spamming opportunities and interesting articles across several communities (mostly good mind you), there have been a few bright points of conversation, most of them stemming from Steve Hargadon’s Education Revolution community. In addition to exploring the wonderfully reflective questions and conversations that Steve can induce in most corners of the Internet, I also signed up for #ETMOOC, one of those trendy Massively Open Online Courses with a twist; it’s taking a desegregated  approach to conversation and learning in that all of the participants will be blogging on their own individual websites and blogs, with the results being syndicated through a central hub. It’s very much akin to DS106 (it should be as they’re both sharing the same technical expertise of Alan Levine), and is attempting to allow each of the course members to have their own distinct voice, yet curate them into one gigantic stream of narration. I predict a massive conflagration of learning and blogging, but there was one hurdle that took me awhile to overcome while going through the course’s pre-orientation check list; Introductions. Like a good constructivist-based course, the first goal of the instructors (led by Alec Couros) is to get us all connected, introduced to one another, and feeling comfortable. To that end, they setup a Google+ Community for us to have a centralized common "class discussion" area in addition to our blogs. Many people have introduced themselves with links to their blogs, brief descriptions of what they do, and where they live, but after starting (and stopping) several time to craft a succinct introduction post, I gave up. The course itself is a study of Educational Technology and Media, so I shifted gears, opened up Photoshop, and took a page from one of my old media creations on introducing oneself. Thus far, the "Hello" poster that I created has been warmly received, which was a huge relief to me. Most of the other course participants hail from universities and institutions that make it their business to teach and facilitate others about the use of media and technology in education, so receiving their nods of approval was great validation. How much time did I invest in my introduction image versus a traditional "Hi, I’m Ben" post on the forums? A LOT! Was it worth it? Hopefully, yes. A large portion of educators talk and talk about media, yet a lot of us seem to keep coming back to share through just one form of it….text. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing! Text is comfortable, re-assuring, and highly accessible by many (the image I created is terrible for those with visual impairments), not to mention that ability of it to be translated into other languages via simple and free software. It’s just that the more I find myself working with a variety of media in classrooms while helping teachers and students, I discover that the fidelity I can create with that same media pales into comparison with the level of writing that I would like to pretend I’ve achieved. Thus, my first foray into a course on media begins with a media creation that mixes both text and visual elements…..and a small container of aloe vera yogurt (it tastes about as good as you’d think, but I’m usually excited to try new things). It wasn’t that hard either. Just a few minutes with Photoshop, the eraser tool, and the text tool. I could do without the background layer, and drop shadows on the text, as that’s what took me the longest trying to get the "perfect" look to the piece. I’m not going to do a "how to" on this one, although Brian Bennett might chastise me for it. Instead, I’ll link to my previous "What’s Inside Ben Rimes" poster that I created a year and a half ago as a similar way of introducing myself to the DS106 community. I’ll end simply not by linking to some new app or website that you can create your own introduction image, but rather a challenge to actually open up Microsoft Paint, Preview, GIMP, or some other visual editing tool (heck, even Word or Pages would work), and create your own "introduction poster". It’s certainly not going to be high art, and my creation isn’t the best piece of media I’ve created, but you have to start somewhere, and saying hello is certainly a good place to do it, right?