This TED talk begins a bit slowly but stick with it. John has some absolutely beautiful points and observations that create the need to ensure that my future child(ren) will have similar learning experiences. His talk reminds us that our world’s problems span the generations and that our ideas of conventional wisdom and education are undergoing a paradigm shift to new ways of learning and creativity and that learning is a lifelong process. Some of our best teachers are experiences, contexts, debates, and ideas… and not necessarily the traditional concept of one person who holds all of the answers without being challenged or compelled to think differently.
Tiny Habits: Self Reflection Pt 2
I have completed the week of learning to develop new behaviors that are the basis of BJ Fogg’s 3 Tiny Habits project. Learning and unlearning behaviors is a current focus of mine. I once thought that change in behavior must come first by changing the initial thought. However, I have found in my own experiences that that is not necessarily true. This project has provided more evidence that I can choose to alter behaviors, which assists in the ability to alter my thought processes and to become more cognizant of these thought processes.
For instance, I noticed that my morning and afternoon habits were not difficult to maintain but my evening habit remained difficult to perform. There were various reasons for this; multiple distractions around the apartment e.g. internet and TV, not having the book with me after dinner if I was not home, and choosing to relax after work instead of furthering my mental stimulation. I had chosen the reading as my last habit of the day so I would be able to focus on it and read more if I wanted to. However, I believe my initial thought was incorrect now so I have decided to start a new week of habits and begin my day with reading. My hypothesis is that I will think about what I’ve read during my day and have more time to process and internalize what I have read instead of becoming distracted.
After this is done, I must find habits and ways to anchor them that encourage the same level of mental stimulation in the evening as I experience earlier in the day. By doing this, I can focus on game elements that could potentially sustain stable levels of mental stimulation even after a full day of work and constantly having to multitask and “be on my game.” A great portion of obstacles that stand in the way of a person’s goals appears to come from a lack of motivation however, by creating a series of habits, I think motivation can marry itself to habits that are positively reflected by the presence of progress.
Tiny Habits: Self Reflection Pt 1
I am currently participating in the 5-day program that BJ Fogg calls 3 Tiny Habits, which has the purpose of creating new behaviors in life.
The three habits that I have chosen include:
After I am finished showering in the morning, I will do 5 push ups.
After I eat dinner, I will read one sentence from my Game Architecture and Design book.
After I finish lunch, I will stretch my arm and hand to help prevent carpal tunnel.
I am currently on Day 2/5 and have made some observations regarding my behaviors. Consciously choosing to limit the amount of push ups that I do in the morning has caused me to focus more on form and quality rather than quantity. The first time I did these five pushups, I thought to myself, “I can do a lot more than five. Why should I stop now?” However, I was interested to see how it would go and I have been working on improving and maintaining my self control (which is why I chose five to begin with… I knew I would be tempted to immediately increase the quantity). My attention is caught by creating that automatic behavior and then positively reinforcing it and this leads me down another path that encompasses reinforcement during gameplay as this is a project I have voluntarily chosen to participate in. There are defined goals and the reward of sharing my accomplishment(s) with BJ in that email to him that says I have successfully completed the actioning of my habits for the day. This leads me to the reaffirming observation that I am partially motivated by sharing my achievements with others.
The most difficult habit to complete so far is to read a sentence from a game design book. I have discovered that this is generated by the context of not eating dinner at the same time in the evenings, eating at home or eating out at a restaurant or with friends, and by making other evening plans after work that cause me not be home immediately after dinner. So I have observed that if there is a delay between my behavior that is supposed to be my anchor for remembering when to do these habits and the desired habit then the chances of me performing my desired habit decrease quite significantly and I do not derive the same sort of satisfaction that I have felt otherwise.
Anyway, that is an update on my progression through this program. I will summarize the rest of the experience at the end of the five days.
5 ways to listen better: Julian Treasure on TED
In a few months I will be practicing Vipassana with a focus on listening better and listening more. When he speaks of people wearing their earphones to drown out the sounds around them, it reminds me of Eli Pariser’s TED talk on filter bubbles.
Learning, unlearning, conversation, and discovery
Learning is a universal characteristic of humanity. The process of learning might differ between cultures and societies yet we’re all learning. The learning process begins when we’re babies. We cried for attention, for food, for comfort. We’ve learned that a bare hand touching a hot pan requires caution and perhaps protection. We’ve learned a seemingly infinite amount of knowledge that we continue to collect and expand upon and modify. How to maintain balance walking on a curb, what neighborhoods we don’t want to walk alone in after dark, and what skills we excel at and what skills have opportunity to improve. Developmental courage is one avenue that provides us with the inner strength to meet and overcome challenges, to engage in the process of disruptive thinking and discovery. Discoveries are shared with one another whether it’s a discovery with reason to celebrate or a discovery that raises concern. Attitudes and perspectives are ours to shape and live with.
I am including a document and its Compendium image of skills, tools, and processes that will be necessary in creating self-autonomous life-long learners and in finding solutions that address Earth’s urgent and complex problems.
Towards An Architecture for Discovery Learning
Nefer Lin Park
nefer.park@gmail.com
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
–Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
“Think different.”
-Apple Inc.
If we are to find solutions to planet Earth’s complex and urgent problems, we must achieve buy-in from a majority of stakeholders. Further, we must evolve our collective ability to find and connect dots (discrete concepts and ideas) that are the products of human discoveries. To do so, we must think differently and collaboratively. What we seek is nothing less than a global and friendly disruption of the status quo. We see an opportunity to incorporate advanced technology for learning and discovery into our personal and collective journeys as self-autonomous life-long learners. In the following paragraphs, I will sketch aspects of my views and tie those together with a vision for the future at the end.
Action oriented research can play a critical role in learner centric discovery as researchers of all ages examine the impact of self-participation and how methodology changes as the inquiry progresses. Appreciative inquiry (AI) is another way to promote learner centric discovery. Appreciative inquiry seeks to improve and renew an already existing system rather than envisioning that system as a problem to be solved. This perspective is used to build organizations based on what works as a means to find solutions to problems. In this capacity, AI asks questions in such a way that promotes positive relationships with opportunity to open the gateway for change and collaboration. AI is one form of positive discourse.
Positive discourse enables learners to co-create in safe and empowering environments. The simplest example is the Socratic method of asking questions rather than challenging with arguments. One example of positive discourse in relation to thinking differently is the emergence of ecopsychology. Ecopsychology seeks to bridge the gap between self and environment by demonstrating the influence each has on the other, resulting in the self’s awareness of a feedback system. A second example of positive discourse is Jane McGonigal’s vision that we can learn from game designers. One game design construct, massive multiplayer online game (MMO), is designed for players all over the world to interact with each other in the same virtual space at the same time. With the use of this construct among others, McGonigal has demonstrated that game mechanics are intentionally designed for fulfilling human needs not satisfied in real life. Such needs include reducing social anxiety, viewing failure as a fun process, increasing the feeling of productivity and motivation, and decreasing stress. We can examine game mechanics and discover ways to satisfy such needs in real life. Instead of viewing video games as obstacles to player’s learning in taking time away from studying, viewing games as purely entertainment, and decreasing sociability amongst peers, McGonigal has chosen appreciative inquiry to tie MMOs in as part of the equation in discovery and design for valued and possible futures.
Within game mechanics, failure is not a daunting obstacle for players. It’s a fun process. Games provide challenges to be overcome, not problems to be solved. Rule sets vary between games, partnerships are built in collaborative effort toward greater purpose, win-win situations are established, and these altered thought processes have resulted in total engagement. McGonigal says, “For a game to feel like a cause, two things need to happen. First, the game’s story needs to become a collective context for action… Hundreds of thousands or millions of players acting in the same context together, and talking to each other… about the actions they’re taking… the actions that players take inside the collective context need to feel like service: every effort by one player must ultimately benefit all the other players. In other words, every individual act of game play has to eventually add up to something bigger.”[1]
Such examples illustrate disruptive thinking in the face of common sense. Traditionally, video games have been thought to have little value aside from entertainment. With games like World of Warcraft, that have negatively impacted players e.g. losing jobs, becoming antisocial in real life, breaking up relationships, the reputation of these types of games have been thought of as a “time suck” and detrimental to one’s physical and mental health. However, disruptive thinking has shifted that perception to dig deeper into the constructs of the games and their impacts on players who benefit with less social anxiety than before playing, multiplayer games that provide ambient sociability, and encouragement of collaboration to meet challenges within the shared collaboration-oriented space of the virtual game environment.
Once motivated to seek knowledge to assist in developing their information constructs and refine their questions, learners e.g. game players enter into a state of flow within their chosen game. The state of flow is both immersive and energizing for the learner. From every answer, more questions arise. The pursuit of knowledge becomes a demand. This state of flow can occur in all activities, from reading to conversing to kinetic building. Flow’s psycho-social state can be achieved through the assistance of psychology inherent in game mechanics.
Both inside and outside of the shared virtual game space the real fun begins when disruptive thinking meets positive discourse! Acquisition of knowledge in a learner centric space is one way for the fun to occur. When a learner is critically thinking in search for autonomy, the successful act of discovery is profound to the learner. The ability to find and connect the dots is a skill that can be learned and shaped as other skills can. Thus discoveries are born.
And how will we share with others what we’ve created? How will others share with us? While there is a multitude of ways, we have chosen to speak to one approach: knowledge gardens.
A knowledge garden is a place for the collection, organization, and deliberation, the co-creation of ideas. People of all ages can play in this garden to look at ideas and see those through their own lenses of perspective, experience, and interests. Dots can be seen and connections can be discovered or created. The beauty of this garden is that connections for one individual will not be the same for another and therein lays sustainable opportunity for learner-led dialogue, for co-creation, and for discovery. As we can imagine, the scope and logistics of a worldwide platform ‘garden’ for people to share ideas, connect dots, engage in collaborative discovery, and develop solutions that overcome conventional wisdom is far from ordinary in vision, scale, and teamwork. Regarding epic environments in game play, specifically a game named Halo, McGonigal says, “Gamers aren’t so much in awe of the environment itself as they are in the awe of the work and dedication and vision required to create it.”[2] We have the opportunity as well as the abilities to create such empowering environments for learners to engage in discoveries of epic proportions. The entire garden is crafted by humans on a global platform that invites and encourages collective intelligence through collaboration.
I expect to research and contribute in the psycho-social ramifications of collaboration and in the context of games and activities to assist in the evolution of the learner’s journey to self discovery and autonomous learning capabilities. A Chinese proverb I especially like, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” To the extent that we are able to create learning strategies and facilities to serve the needs of large populations on planet Earth, we gain significant opportunities to co-create and to use dynamic learning environments for today and for the future.
[1] McGonigal, Jane. 2011. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World. The Penguin Press. 101.
[2] Ibid., p. 105
A Web of One
The concept of a filter bubble is information the internet provides you, based on previous history and other variables, rather than a standard result applicable to everyone. It’s seen everywhere from Gmail’s ads in the sidebar to Yahoo’s news, from a Facebook feed to search results. Thus, information that can be necessary for the evolution of thought, change, creativity, and discovery could be hidden from plain sight. It’s an important talk: Eli Pariser’s ‘filter bubbles.’
Seed Magazine: Buddhism and the Brain
The article Buddhism and the Brain by David Weisman explores the overlap between Buddhism and neuroscience as well as differences that include reincarnation. Psychology appears to be gathering strength towards another avenue of pursuit in which the self is not a standalone and reliable entity but more a constantly changing and impermanent part of a series of ecosystems. The ecosystems vary in size when encompassing body, mind, community, and environment.
An excerpt of David’s article:
“Consider how easily Buddhism accepts what happened to Mr. Logosh. Anatta is not a unified, unchanging self. It is more like a concert, constantly changing emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Our minds are fragmented and impermanent. A change occurred in the band, so it follows that one expects a change in the music.
Both Buddhism and neuroscience converge on a similar point of view: The way it feels isn’t how it is. There is no permanent, constant soul in the background. Even our language about ourselves is to be distrusted (requiring the tortured negation of anatta). In the broadest strokes then, neuroscience and Buddhism agree.”
Leadership & Guilds
Leadership
When you hear that word, what do you think of? (No, seriously, comment with your first impression. I’m interested in hearing what other people think of.)
Leadership can be thought of as a collection of characteristics (trait theory) that result in having a large amount of social influence. Another example would be using the available resources of an environment to meet goals. Even asking the right questions to result in problem definition and solution oriented actions. The concept can be thought of as transactional and transformational, democratic, autocratic… needless to say, there are numerous theories and views on what a leader is and isn’t.
When I see “leader,” I tend to first think of an individual who is 1) memorable and 2) instigates change. I see leading as both an obvious or emergent quality dependent on situation, goals, and resources known. How does this tie into gaming? Many social games have collections of people who form into guilds. There are PvP (player vs. player) and PvE (player vs. environment) and RP (role play) guilds as several examples. Each of these guilds have different end goals.
As a specific example from my experience playing WoW, PvP was dedicated to ranking high on fighting other players and was demonstrated by different titles depending on how many rounds of battles were fought and players killed e.g. title – Stone Guard and battlegrounds – Arathi Basin, Alterac Valley. Another way this was demonstrated was by ‘honor’ and with honor came points that could be used toward purchasing armor or weapons that could be attained only by queuing up for battlegrounds that transported each player to an “official” battle. PvE was all about the end game e.g. instances – Blackwing Lair, Karazhan. Each instance would require a raid party of a varying number of players depending on the difficulty level. There was also a level requirement to enter into an instance. Again, the reward would be armor, weapons, and loot (translating into gold (currency)).
The bigger guilds of each realm (realms were based on real life location) would have a reputation of being PvP or PvE. I played on the realm of Garithos and the most popular (and biggest) guilds would have requirements for becoming a member such as having a certain amount of honor kills or experience or even time requirement (be available on Sundays at 7 GMT for X raid/X battleground). So 1) each guild had its own set of goals and 2) each guild had a GM (guild master) and 3) regardless of guild, each player would have to work as part of a team to achieve any sort of high level playing. So structure and communication varied from using real time communication with headsets and mics over Ventrillo to texting each other on mobile phones to creating forums that members could sign into. Each leader had his or her own way of running a guild, as does each individual filling a leadership position in real life. And true to the human spirit, each team has its own dynamic that is unique and attributed to the combination of individual talents, personalities, and ideas that individuals bring to their teams.
As such, I have started a map of leadership, its role and various ideas about the concept. To view the map so it’s legible, click to enlarge and it’ll show as full size. As always, feedback is welcome.
Games will save the planet.
Often times I have wondered, how has it happened that sports has gotten to be so popular while very important topics have fallen into the background? Important topics being research, climate change, conservation, education, economics… you name it. In prior years I have attributed this phenomena to the avoidance of personal responsibility, conformity (normative and informational social influence), fun (entertainment), etc.
The prospect of immersion became integrated into this after a personal encounter with WoW (World of Warcraft). I began to look at similarities between WoW and another game I had a love affair with, NationStates. The interest in immersion led to positive psychologist, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow. My question began to evolve. Suddenly, it wasn’t all about why entertainment has come to overshadow important issues but how do we create social change and influence? More specifically, how can we create social change to address and solve wicked problems? How do we save the planet?
Enter dialogic conversation. My favorite example of this is the concept Juanita Brown’s The World Café; “Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter”. The World Café works like this; a broad open ended question is posed to a room with multiple tables composed of several individuals. They write their responses on the tablecloth and after a specific amount of time is up, some of those individuals move tables. So they are sitting at different tables and read responses that were written before them. They have the opportunity to write their reply to those responses and suddenly, conversation is sustainable. When the allotted time is over for everyone, a facilitator(s) will show responses from the tablecloths to the whole room. It is here that constructive problem solving manifests and turns viral. I actually tried this approach myself at a previous job and found it to be wildly successful. The workflow in our department was not efficient and who would know this better than the people who were performing these tasks? Managers were asking for insight but employee feedback was minimal. So I reconstructed the concept of The World Café and we found firstly, what the inefficiency in the tasks were and what could be changed then through facilitation, we discovered how to make those changes. Feedback was phenomenal and during this time, it was fun. It was a game for everyone.
With that said, we are social creatures. We create and maintain relationships every day. Every day relationships change due to the choices we each make and directions we travel – literally and metaphorically, moments we share, and underlying it all; conversations we have. The conversation can be via face to face, phone, email, texting, blogging, through social networking sites… all of it has an impact on that relationship. Problems are solved every day through communication with one another. “I don’t have the car today, who will pick up the kids?” “My mom has company over tonight so we can’t meet here, where else can we meet?” So why not begin having conversations that address real world problems with each other?
It just isn’t as interesting. It isn’t as directly relevant to one’s life as fighting cancer if you or anyone around you doesn’t have cancer. It isn’t as fun.
Enter smart gaming.
What the hell is smart gaming and how is that supposed to help us? Games are all about entertainment and are a monumental waste of time, right? However, the military uses games as part of their trainings as do many companies. With the emergence of games like FoldIt!, we are on a new path to reinventing the way we will save the planet. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink discusses how careful examination and rational thought do not always yield the correct result. He begins with an example of a kouros that the Getty was planning to acquire but needed to know if it was legitimate or fake. After careful examination by a geologist, it was thought to be genuine. On first impression by several art historians and museum directors, it was thought to be fake. It was fake. Blink is all about those first two seconds it takes to make an impression. FoldIt! uses an approach that integrates that sort of psychology to problem solving. The game can be played by anyone, they do not need any sort of knowledge base because they learn through the game. They can fold computerized proteins into different formations and viola, suddenly FoldIt! is all over the news. Whereas the art historians had a strong foundation of knowledge they were able to unconsciously drawn on, FoldIt! players had a foundation of how to play a game that they were able to drawn on and with an entirely new element of rules and information (as all games provide), they are contributors to the bigger game of researching cancer.
A quickly emerging champion of using games as an avenue in creating higher quality of life and in saving the planet is Jane McGonigal. I saw her speak at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto last month and am currently reading her book, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World and thus far, she has nailed it dead on. Her use of combining psychology and game design together in a clearly understandable solution based idea will hugely assist in propelling game designers, sociologists, and psychologists to create and improve upon collaborative games that will save the planet.
Another such champion of this quickly changing future we are creating for ourselves is Stanford’s Peace Innovative Lab, which is part of the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab. When you visit the Persuasive Tech Lab, the opening paragraph reads, “The Peace Innovation Lab is an initiative from Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab. Launched in Spring 2010, the PI Lab is focused on casting a spotlight on how technology and emerging social behaviors and insights are promoting new paths to global peace.” Universiti Sains Malaysia has a research center as well, Research and Education for Peace [REPUSM] in their school of social sciences. Additionally, Open University in Milton Keynes has multiple programmes that encourage and foster dialogic conversation as such with Jeff Conklin’s issue mapping courses and the open source use of Compendium, a tool used for issue and dialogue mapping.
I, for one, am hugely excited to be living in and taking part in saving the world through such avenues of innovative and world altering reality! No longer do I wonder how so much value can be placed on a football team because it makes perfect sense. My background in psychology and observations as well as McGonigal’s storytelling of fiero make sense out of social phenomena. No, I now ask how we can turn this knowledge and infinitely growing understanding of people and fun to save the planet. I wholeheartedly believe that games will save the planet. And why do I believe such? Because teams win.
note to self; social networks within ecopsychology
Social networks take a look at social mobility, access to information, who is in the core or the periphery of a network, and the number of jumps it takes to gain immediate access to the source… as the experiment of Kevin Bacon and the six degrees of separation demonstrates. This field of research is detrimental to the framework of introducing ecopsychology into the daily lives of the status quo. Connectors, mavens, and salespeople as described in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point are all dots on the wall that must be connected and then examined to see where the centrality is located, who the main players are, and who the players with the most social influence could be in order to turn the tide. The research for this is ongoing as the players and the circumstances are ever changing and evolving.
That will be my next map. I am currently searching for a chart that maps the evolution of change. Please let me know if you’ve suggestions.
