Dr. Uttich says the function of play is to balance the seriousness of learning, and she specifically aims play at whatever the student is blocked by (I'm paraphrasing her, I hope not wrongly). She mentions writing students believing they can't write, and she says that it gets rid of the fear of asking questions. It's not just engagement bc "fun", also bc "less threatening".
I've been really critical of myself whenever students don't understand things that I gamify, mainly bc life's difficult enough, and here I've made it harder for students when I was trying to make it easier. There's two lessons to learn from Uttich's interview, one - the playful part is supposed to make them ask more questions. Two - gamification isn't just (or even at all?) meant to make boring material engaging, it's to make sure the course is challenging in the right way, in other words, it's the same function that the Sonic Screwdriver has for writers of Dr. Who - it's so that the challenges the hero faces aren't mundane challenges (like a door). Play in class preserves the challenge in all the right parts, and can remove them in the parts that aren't core to the curriculum (like fear of failure).
I'm keeping the notes on that simple because I'm clear on the parts of it that I will need to remember in the coming weeks (to say nothing of months!)... still, I wish I could meditate longer on the escape room method of making sure they've read the syllabus, but my brain can't even begin to handle that right now (also, I teach online, so it'll just make me yearn to teach in person too poignantly).
Okay, there's a lot in there.
I can only zero in on one aspect of this at a time, I think my brain is just hijacked by a lot of "midterm" concerns with my students. I gather this article's importance is w/ regard to the "intrisic vs extrinsic" motivation debate, because it says that whether the key motivations are intrinsic or extrinsic ones (in online classes, the only kind I teach at the moment) depends on the student's attitude toward online learning in general. This makes sense, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do about this information though. I also thought the literature review was a bit... off? Like it was aimed at just slightly the wrong thing, because there's not enough x-reference with kniowledge from game design itself (although it's possible I'll never be satisfied with any article like this until game design is the primary discipline and education the secondary one... this is a kneejerk bias of mine that comes from a bitterness that is not as strong in my life as it used to be, so I'm warming up to education as a field...)
This was scary. P. 1318 - The surprise of the study, was that external regulation led to negative results, which diverged from previoous studies (which found mixed results) perhaps because (this is the scary part) previous studied didn't take very meny metric of student-well-being into account. Scary bc, is all the research we're working with blind to the same things, which are now considered central or crucial?
To make sure I understand introjection - it's external in origin, but it happens when a subject (student) is... forced? compelled? to internalize it as a personal motivation. If I understand it right, then p. 1311 is important to my research (probably) -- "...we found that in relation to mastery-approach orientation, amotivation was negatively related ... and external regulation unrelated. Introjection had a moderate positive correlation... identified and intrinsic motivations had strong positive relationships ... Mastery avoidance was unrelated to amotivation and positively related to all remaining types of motivation" -- the way Mastery Avoidance was discussed was as "neither clearly adaptive nor clearly maladaptive", but it's looking more like it's adaptive? I agree that's counter-intuitive, but is there some reason I'm not seeing to regard it as "neither adaptive nor maladaptive" when it's... it's a legit helpful approach (somehow)...? This article made me feel kind of dumb, but I was glad to identify some helpful questions within it. I _did_ feel more confident about the fascinating material about how these things change with age (when introjection has a positive relationship to maladaption as students get older... my amateur/armchair interpretation of this, and I know I have a lot more reading on this to do, is that it means it's less healthy to allow external motivations to become internalized as we grow older, maybe bc we should be deciding on systems like that for ourselves?)
The serenely readable Miller article hits home -- I would have thought that being so deep into adulthood would make me immune to the things I used to feel about being in a class, like these negative spirals I could go into just from things that happened in a class a long time ago. Even when teaching, I didn't experience those things anymore. But just like the article said, a few ill-thought-out words from a teacher can throw a class off... I do think it's worse for younger students though, adults or not. I have an instructor now who has a lot of helpful professional experience, but doesn't really know how to talk to people when they're students not co-workers... I say this because one student I talk to in that class (much younger than me) was really, really upset (I was more "vaguely annoyed") -- the Miller article framing this as a kind of adaptive/maladaptive response to stimulus that only really happens in an educational context is fascinating, and suggests I may have been wrong in my earlier opinions from this week -- maybe the study of motivations in games isn't really a perfect source for the study of motivations in courses. Maybe it's not an untapped source of models for how to leverage motivation in a class... but (I'm just thinking this out as I write)... maybe NPCs are... there's this talk about the creation of an NPC coach from GDC, I swear it used to be on YouTube... it may be on the vault, I'll have to dig around for it... but there was a wonderfully encouraging NPC coach character created for some game, grrr I can't find it or remember it right now... I have to look at that talk again vis a vis this article, so now NPCs are the topic of this week's "lab notes"...
It's P. 177 of the Miller article that shows where this PC research is evident. Miller says online is different than in-person because without the motivation that's automatic in face-to-face learning, there's many other factors to consider that aren't easy to see (and that teachers aren't accustomed to looking for). Miller is pointing to the absence of a _character_. I have used NPCs in teching gamified classes with really weirdly mixed results, including a stuffed animal (a sloth, named Simon, who was my "TA") whom undergrads detested and grad students really enjoyed (I would have thought it would be the other way around). Originally, I had used him mainly to give students a way to dissect the _concept_ of an NPC, but now I'm wondering if the better function might be what Miller's pointing to as the "absence" which, in face-to-face learning, does not exist... "The Absence Which Does Not Exist" is a good title for a paper (no it's not. I'm leaving that in there, but it's a terrible, stoner title for a paper.) -- NPCs as Mitigating Absence might be a good thing to explore though... I'll add something to one of my current classes, I could use a disaster like that to cure the monotony...
I'll need more time with this book...
So I can only rate this book on a ten scale, 1 being "Saturated with the things about educational gamification that drive game designers crazy" and 10 being "Something every gamification expert should read, because it finally frees us from all the dull silliness of the old paradigms of gamification". ... I'm only a little ways in, so far it's a promising 6.5