Mission US, A Game that Blows My Mind!

I never thought that history could be taught this way! I can still remember how we used to bury our heads in history textbooks memorizing who did what in which year. This was how we studied history. To be honest, I don't remember much about the textbooks now.

Mission US is a game, but it is much more serious than any textbooks about history that I have ever read. The reason is that it is not about bulky books trying to cram students with facts but about stories that would happen to an ordinary person in a certain historical and cultural context. It is truly amazing!

I played the game twice, each time for an hour. I tried two missions, one in the context of 1770 and one in 1848. Through two animated teenagers’ roles, I got to live their lives in history, talked to different people, learned about the world back then and relived the key moments in history. Each role is set in a different identity in a different era in history. Players would play as these teenagers, experience their lives, finish their tasks and more importantly, learn about society in history during the process.

(see how the roles are culturally diversified!)

To me, the game is more meaningful in cultural education than linguistic education. To be honest, I myself have many words that I have no clues what the meanings are in a certain history context. So I would be concerned that the words in the games are extremely demanding to L2 learners, maybe except for college students who major in English language and literature. If asked to learn every detail of the stories, hidden historical facts and social status, students would lose the interests due to the totally demanding culture-embedded texts. However, it doesn't mean we can’t use it in language teaching.

I would use it as an extensive cultural class. Here are what my objectives would be:

1. For each mission, students should be able to summarize the main social classes and conflicts in the historical contexts, different parties and their different interests.

2. For each mission, students should be able to identify the key features of the specific era in American history and why it is so important in history.

3. For each mission, students should be able to understand at least 10 new words that are embedded with cultural meanings.

4. For each mission, students should be able to identify reasons for why choosing some answers over others to at least 5 interactions with different roles.

(These objectives are constructed by myself, but I did refer to Kyle Mawer's task types)

How to assess if students have achieved these goals?

For objectives 1 and 2, I would have students write short essays to respond to a series of prompts I have designed for them, mainly on historical significance and social conflicts in a certain period. For objective 3 and 4, I would pick up some conversations from the plot and go through them with students. During the process, I can access them orally. Since the contents are mostly about conversations, the dialogic communication of the game is quite helpful. However, the communication is achieved by oral expressions from the roles in the game and the multiple choice questions for the students. I would have students to perform the conversations in real life, so that they can also produce outputs, and meanwhile, I could assess whether they have made the right choices and what their understandings are towards the different choices.

Language performance indicators: ESL.C.9-12.5.1.2

Students demonstrate an understanding of a broad range of US cultural and political referents through institutions, functions and processes at the local and national levels, and compare/contrast these with parallels in the student’ native community.

Escape games

I tried an Escape game, which you may find here. I personally love Escape games. I used to play such games for hours on iPad. But the games I played were in Chinese, so I never realized how they could be connected to language learning and teaching. 

I have played the game twice, each time for around one hour. Here are some features of the game that I summarized :

1. Finding clues. The clues are the most important information the player should get to finally "escape" from the room. Clues are spread out across several rooms, sometimes hidden somewhere or sometimes logically connected (the player has to decode one before he/she can go on and decode another). 

2. Making sense of the clues. Clues are, most of the time, seemingly irrelevant to each other. The play must find the links between clues so that they can make sense of the clues. For example, to get one piece of puzzle, the player must break a balloon to get the piece of paper. How to break a balloon? The player may think about finding something with a sharp end. The only thing that is sharp in the room is the thumb-pin. So the player may go and click on the pin. Otherwise, the player wouldn't be aware of clicking on the pins. 

3. Finding the code to the lock and get out of there. After collecting all clues and making sense of them, the player would be able to find the ultimate information, the code to the lock, so that he/she may get out of there. The player will have a huge sense of achievement after he/she hears the opening of the door. 

How can we connect these features to language teaching and learning? What surprises me is that the instructions given in the game are a lot like the ones in Chinese, simple and communicative. Here I would analyze the language in the escape games in the following ways: 

1. Reading is the essential part of the game. No opportunity to speak or write anything. Players have to understand all the clues before they can win the games. 

2. To go deeper in reading, we can see that the texts include many indicators on lexical, syntactic and sometimes pragmatic levels. When players click on the image of a chair, if there is no clue there, it would simply say "it is a chair". If there is some clue, it may say "Check if there is anything else there". Sometimes, the system would post things like, "I already have one" or "A balloon!Yeah!" Information as such may not have direct clues, but players may infer from such messages and get other clues. 

3. The language used in the games is communicative, or dialogic. Players are not just following orders or instructions. They can establish a context with the system language. It is what I believe the most important language feature of escape games. 

Teacher's role: The teacher would play the role of the system language, giving clues and establishing a contextualized conversation with students so that they may learn things while trying to escaping from the rooms. 

Students' involvement: I strongly believe that escape games would be a huge magnet to students. Students, especially teenagers, love playing the detective roles to tell others how smart they are. They will surely get involved. However, to win the games, they have to understand all clues in English, so such games are challenging on both detective level and language proficiency level. So they must motivate themselves to learn. 

How to use it in classroom: I would use it as a peer game. Students can get into pairs and play it together. Students' different knowledge base may enhance each other. They can use dictionaries, but they can't go right to the walkthrough. The Teacher may have a pilot game with the entire class using a computer and projector first. The Teacher shall go around the classroom and inspire pairs who get stuck in the game. The game can't be played by images. Students must have access to computers. So I think the games can only be used in lab classes. 

How to use the walkthrough: It is the trickiest part. Follow the walkthrough, and all problems would be solved in one second. The teacher shall not use it in class. Actually, the main goal of playing the game is not to win it but to help students learn language during the process. After going back and forth looking for clues, students may have already learned a lot. The walkthrough may be given to them by the end of the class so that they can check by themselves. 

Language performance indicators: ESL 1.5-8.1.1.2.
Students read, gather, view, listen to, organize, discuss, interpret and analyze information related to academic content areas and various sources.  

Gamification in language learning

Gamification is new to me. To be honest, I never used it in one class, or across a semester. I mean, we do use class activities to practice or to assess students' learning outcomes, but we never used a "game" in one single class or even for a longitudinal period of time. What is a game? What are the differences of between a game and an activity? 

To find what a game is, I think we should first define what Game Mechanics is. In an article by Miguel Sicart, the author defines Game Mechanics as the "methods invoked by agents, designed for interaction with the game state."( see  Game Mechanics). In another article on digital games, the authors also highlighted five areas where the parallels between digital game deign and second language acquisition principles, which are goals, interaction, feedback, context and motivation. (see  Technology—“Just” Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning )

To me, the most important nature of games, which is also clarified in both definitions in the above articles, is "interactions". Social interactions are extremely important to the process of learning, according to Sociocultural Theories: we learn things through interacting with others through mediation. I believe the interactive nature of games makes the learning more effective, fun and motivated. On the other hand, class activities are not always interactive. 

Another feature of games I want to mention is "the flow". What is the flow? "The flow experience is one of the most universally euphoric experiences human beings enjoy. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines it as "the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning." (see Sculpting Flow and Fiero). The three factors proposed by Csikszentmihalyi are clear goals, rigidly defined rules of engagement and the potential for measured improvement in the context of those goals and rules. Therefore, in games, we want our students to be challenged in a context of rules to reach a certain goal, during which process, students learn things and the teacher assesses how much improvement students has accomplished. 

Moreover, since games are interactive, other interaction-relevant key concepts can not be ignored, such as feedback, agency and communication. Students may get feedback from their peers and the teacher in games and learn through the interaction. Each students are not just participating as individuals but as agents of their own backgrounds and cultures, so the teacher must be aware of the individuality of each student and explore how to get each student engaged in the most effective way. 

What comes to my mind about using games in language learning is that the teacher must clarify the goals and rules before the games. Since games are highly motivational as they are easy to make students distracted, to manage games in class context, especially the digital games, the teacher should make sure students understand why they are playing, what they are trying to learn and how to enhance the learning not only for themselves but also for others in class. 

Reconsidering what tweeting means to language learners

I was quite confident in my last post when I said it could be quite demanding and stressful for language learners to tweet in English, since twitter feed only allows 140 characters. But now, I am reconsidering my point. As a matter of fact, I realized that I was too negative about challenges. 

Chinese language is loose, scattered and flowing wherever thoughts go. I told my students to be concise and straightforward for millions of times when I was reviewing their essays. As a learner myself, it took me so many years to give up detouring in sentence writing and intentionally written long sentences (still trying). Maybe a limited space would be a new and better way for students to rethink their syntactic structure and reshape their writing. 

There is a famous metaphor about Chinese and English. Chinese is like grapes and English is like bamboo. Grapes expand to all directions in small units and bamboo goes straight from one section to another logically. Maybe twitter's linear text input space may reshape Chinese speakers' languaging process and improve their cognitive level of thinking in English. 

 

How to use Twitter in ESL teaching?

Although we can’t access to Twitter in China, we have a similar website, Weibo. It is like Chinese version of Twitter. Our reflections on Twitter can also be used on Weibo. I have compared the two websites, and they are practically the same to me. The only thing I have found different between them is the length of the tweet. On Twitter, each feed shall not exceed 140 characters. Although it is the same with Chinese characters on Weibo, if we convert the Chinese characters to English characters, we may find the English characters allowed on Weibo are more than those on Twitter. Please see the same feeds on Weibo and Twitter. I selected one feed from an English Weibo account, copied it and pasted it to my Twitter feed. We can see that the same feed on Twitter would exceed the limit by 95 characters. To English learners, it means something.

weibo

twitter

In one of my article reading, a blogger said: “‘Summing Up’ Ask students to read an article or chapter and then post their brief summary or précis of the key point(s). A limit of 140 characters demands a lot of academic discipline.” Teaching with Twitter

For native English speakers, 140 character limit is actually considered as a good way to train the skill of summarizing, but to English learners, it is highly demanding. Not so skillful with playing with words, English learners wouldn't be able to make the most of limited space with the minimum words. Tweeting in English could be really stressful to students. So Chinese Weibo, with larger feed space, might be good news to Chinese students who are learning English.

As I have stated in my previous blog, the most significant meaning of Twitter to me is to explore different communities online. By using Twitter/Weibo, we can establish a community for English learners with similar interests. Some educators extend the online activity to classroom activity, for example, Christine Morris explains how she experimented with the technology with her higher educated students, tapping into Tweetdeck to get the most out Twitter. Christine Morris

It was really inspiring that we as teachers could design a specially session for students to use the technology in class. We can lead students to use Twitter/Weibo outside the classroom in their spare times, we can also design a concentrate session. 

Personally, I may not use such sessions in language classrooms in China, since we have larger class sizes and it would be uncontrollable to manage such a class and unpractical to require all students bring their computers to class. However, I would have a workshop, open to all students who are interested in technology in language learning. At the workshop, I can inspire students how to use media and technologies in enhancing their language education by sharing different tools, practicing these tools in class with access to the Internet and having them share their own understandings of the E-learning. It would be interesting! 

Twitter chats

I had heard about Twitter years ago back in China, but since it is blocked in my home country, I never had an account. Shortly after I arrived in the United States, I created an account on Twitter. I posted two very simple tweets about homesick or something and then I stopped tweeting. The problem was that I didn't know whom to follow! Twitter is a highly contextualized environment with a high sense of identity and community. People tend to find their comfort zones, especially in a strange environment. As the speech on TED about Global Voice we have watched the other day shows, different ethnicity forms different community even on an open forum online, like Twitter. Since Twitter is blocked in China, I have very few friends who would use Twitter. Therefore, I couldn't find my own “community” on Twitter, so I stopped using it after a few days. Why wouldn't I follow whoever on Twitter to fit into the new community? I believe it would be a great idea to make new friends from other communities, but, as we all know, stepping out of the comfort zone is the hardest thing.

This week, our task for LAI 590 is to explore Twitter and how it can be used in language education. I revisited my Twitter account. This time, I had a clear goal: follow some educators on Twitter, learn from them about how to use Twitter and see what I can do with it. I participated in the Twitter chats #langchat. I typed in the #langchat in the search bubble and saw a stream of all tweeters’ feeds who had included #langchat in their feeds. I found some interesting tweets, such as foreign languages learning, teaching techniques and classroom sharing. I picked up some tweeters I liked and followed them. Now I am following almost 60 tweeters. Suddenly, my twitter account was alive! By following these people who share similar interests and pursuits with me, I have my new community. I posted a comment and a question with #langchat. Although no one has responded to me yet, I have three followers from the educators I have followed. I like it here. 

ePals

I love this website because it is a real learning community to me, involving teachers, students, schools and parents! Students are the center of the community. Activity Theory in sociocultural theories suggests the integral role of community in the learning process. Students learn through social interactions and develop themselves in the process. Community is what a student live in and conduct social interactions in, so when the community is recreated online, it is really helpful for students to learn. ePals has different classrooms that students may choose and it also has a special blogging space for students to interact with teachers and with each other, which I was excited to find out！
I am extremely excited to learn about the global community project of ePal! Students in different parts of world may get together in one classroom and learn from each other! This was a huge step forward for the real global voice and the concept of jumping from one flock another. I couldn't wait to introduce the website to my students. I wish one day I could establish a classroom there where my students may communicate with native English speakers who are interested in Chinese culture.

Google+ & Class 2.0

I tried two “community” websites, Google+ Communities and Classroom 2.0.

Google+ Communities is kind of handy, since I am already a Google+ user. I was recommended with many users I had contacted with, which was cool to see some familiar faces. I joined three communities, TED, ELLs and FLT. Members of communities may share texts, pictures, videos… everything with other members, and they can comment on others’ posts. Interactions are realized in comments. I also tried to establish a community myself and posed the first entry. The whole layout was clear and neat. The community can be public or private, which means you may get to decide who can be in your circles. I believe that it would be a wonderful place for interaction journal keeping between students and the teacher. Students may publish whatever they want to share, and the teacher would interact with them in comments. Dialogue journals are often used inn SCT, which I have always wanted to try. The biggest problem here is that Google is blocked for Chinese users, so my students wouldn't be able to use the tool. What a pity! 

Class 2.0 is a comprehensive forum community for participants. One may find everything there, forum, books, audio resources, projects, conferences... I believe it is a wonderful source for us teachers to exchange ideas with peers and learn from them. It is not a student-teacher interactive community, though. Unlike the interactions realized in comments on Google+, interactions on Class 2.0 are realized in traditional forum. Users follow each entry and interact with each other under one entry, one after another. Users may check on the poster's all discussions and follow her and add her to the contact. It is a traditional way of forum community, helpful for group discussions. I may find interesting sparkles in the discussions, but I will not use it as an interactive forum with my students. 

classroom 2.0

Watch out! Scary octopus is here!

photo from: http://pumml.deviantart.com/art/Giant-Octopus-Was-Very-Scary-175910124

Learners are like octopus monsters with long, soft and flexible tentacles. Although the octopuses in my analogy might be quite different from the real natural creatures. I imagine that the tentacles are hollow inside, open-ended for two-way communication, unlimited in quantity and can be any length so that they may reach anything in any distance. Every time a learner is exposed in an environment, he/she reaches to everything possible around and learns things from any source through their tentacles as well as influence other octopuses interacting with him/her.

Technology, or other cultural artifacts may facilitate the process by lengthening the tentacles to reach things far in the distance or space or improving the quality of tentacles’ two-way communication and influences. In the online lecture, the concept of connectivism identifies the learning process on three levels, biological, cognitive and social, all of which can be realized by the enhanced tentacles. As the knowledge information is increasing exponentially in today’s world, strengthened tentacles are the new way of learning.

The article is quite inspirational to me, since the fact that we are learning about learning shows the meta-function of learning. By reflecting on how we learn things, we may dig deeper into how we as teachers may provide what students need to learn. The author said that the traditional methods of studying the process of learning focus only on what happens inside learners; they “fail to address learning that occurs outside people.” Like tentacles, right? We need to examine more on how tentacles contact with tentacles from other learners and how they form a network from which all octopus can suck or share knowledge. The network is what the author refers to as the “small world”.

As I continue to think on my analogy, I would like to emphasize that the tentacles are not artifacts themselves (such as technologies) but integral parts of the body. Where are the technologies? I believe they are the power that enable the tentacles to get long, short, and straightforward or take a detour to another destination. They enhance the connection and make it as varied and full of possibilities. For example, if there were no internet, I would never have learned about the United States, and I would never have the opportunity of being here and writing this article. The technology magically lengthens my tentacles and create more sources for me to learn.

Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens

online lecture about connectivism