Ten Years. Three Truths. One Lie. (And a gratuitous lolcat.) Liz Lawley Rochester Institute of Technology lawley.rit.edu • slideshare.net/mamamusings
May 20, 2015
Ten Years. Three Truths.
One Lie. (And a gratuitous lolcat.)
Liz Lawley Rochester Institute of Technology
lawley.rit.edu • slideshare.net/mamamusings
Ten years ago, at the first GLS, Kurt and Constance were untenured assistant professors. It wasn’t just them; we were all new at this “games and learning stuff.” (I didn’t actually make it to the first one, my first GLS was 3.0)
When I went looking for a recent photo of them on the website for their (not so new now) GLS Center, this is what showed up on the main page. They’re both senior faculty now. As are many of the rest of us who were at those first GLS meetings. Who would have thought, ten years ago, that they’d be running a major research center and acting as advisors to both industry and government?
1We’re the grownups now.
The first truth: We’re the grownups now. We’re the ones with tenure. Even the kids we taught—whether they were middle-‐schoolers or doctoral candidates—are grownups now, or damn close to it.
My son Lane was was 13 when he gave his first invited conference talk (thanks, Barry!) based on his accomplishments in Teen Second Life. We wondered if the amount of game playing we allowed (hell, encouraged) was the right choice.
Apparently it was, because he’s in his final year as an honors CS student at RIT, and is spending the summer working as an intern at Google NY. (He’s pretty much my retirement plan.) It’s not just him, though. The kids we were teaching ten years ago are professionals now. They’re building systems, teaching their own classrooms, changing the contours of the field.
2We’re grownup enough
to challenge our own assumptions.
The second truth. We’ve had enough time now to think about this field, and it has changed enough that we need to be open to rethinking some of our closely-‐held beliefs.
Here’s one we’re particularly fond of: the idea that adding game components to unpleasant material constitutes “chocolate covered broccoli.” (How many times have you heard this over the past three days? A lot, I bet.) This particular image comes from a recent Edutopia article by Matthew Farber on the subject. But it turns out this may not mean what we think it means.
This is Gillian, and I took this photo of her at my house on Memorial Day. She heard some of us talking about “chocolate covered broccoli,” and decided to take advantage of the fondue dish to sample it. Turns out she loved it. Some kids really like broccoli. And some of those, in turn, like it even better when it’s dipped in chocolate.
What else should we be challenging?
It also turns out that a lot of foundational work in many fields is based remarkably small (or out of date) data sets. Miller’s “Magical Number Seven,” for instance, is often cited as gospel in interface (and, worse, Powerpoint slide) design. But it’s based on (a) a tiny data set, and (b) an incorrect interpretation of the original research.
What else should we be challenging?
What else are we accepting on faith that we should be challenging, retesting, exploring now that the landscape has changed?
3Failure is both
inevitable and necessary…
The third truth: We need to fail. More often. And you’re all thinking, “Yes, of course, duh. We know this! That’s what we keep preaching about the value of games for learning!”
And we do know this about games. We talk about it all the time, especially in the context of games and learning. !Unfortunately, we FORGET it when it comes to our own scholarship, our own post-‐school learning.
3Failure is both
inevitable and necessary… Even in scholarship.
The third truth, revised. We need to fail ourselves, in our work. We need to make mistakes, and learn from them. But when we get to be grownups, the reward structure around us doesn’t reward failure—especially in academia.
It’s really, really hard to talk about failed scholarly work. It’s not just that we don’t want other people to look at our failures, we don’t want to look at our failures. And yes, if you’re not yet tenured, the fear is probably justified. Which is why it matters that so many of us are “grownups” now.
But last year I wrote a Hall of Failure paper about Just Press Play, and writing it was one of the best things I’ve done in a long time from a professional growth standpoint. The bad news is that this year nobody submitted to that track. We all seem to be letting our fear of admitting failure control our public presence.
The LieSuccess means
never having to say you’re sorry wrong.
So, these truths lead us to the lie…the lie that success means that you don’t make (or at least don’t admit to) mistakes. Think how reassuring it was, back before you were a grownup, when you found out your heroes had feet of clay. It’s important for us to let the people coming up behind us know the same thing is true of us.
“For the first couple years you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disapointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase, a lot of people at that point they quit.” ! —Ira Glass
Ira Glass did an extraordinary interview on the creative process, and the fact that we all start out making stuff that’s just not good, and need to push through that in order to succeed. I can’t reasonably summarize it in 15 seconds. Google it. Listen to it. Then listen to it again, and again. It’s that good.
Here’s the promised gratuitous lolcat. Complete with old skool scifi reference! We need to let go of our fear of admitting and sharing our mistakes. The fact that there were no submissions to the Hall of Failure track at this year’s conference says that most of us haven’t done that. We’re keeping ourselves from learning from our own mistakes, and we’re failing to model for new students and scholars the reality that progress isn’t a straight line, that not only do we all make mistakes but that those mistakes are valuable to think about and share.
It’s not just conferences where we can do this, though. We can use blogs. We can organize informal gatherings at our institutions and in our communities and at conferences. We can be real grownups, and use our power for good. Let’s do that.