February 2013

I came across the term “Food Desert” a couple of years ago after reading this article in the Roanoke Times. Having spent a large portion of my life in Montreal, Canada, a city where a convenience store was just a block away and the grocery store not more than a ten minute walk or five minute bus ride, I had come to take the availability of quality food for granted. But since I have moved down to the United States, I have lived in small towns that are typically characterized by a mix of suburbs and rural landscapes. There are many things I love here, but one thing that has always been a difficult pill for me to swallow is how so many of the towns and cities here are built to accomodate vehicles. Pedestrians are a complete afterthought, or are given no thought whatsoever. I did not own a vehicle before I moved to the states, and although I largely grew up in Montreal, I also spent time in small towns in Labrador and Ontario. Even in those small towns, the grocery store was never further than a 15 minute walk away and you could always catch a bus there, or ride your bike without having to contend with vehicle traffic.

In general, many cities and towns (with the exception of Toronto) in Canada are clustered instead of sprawling, and they are extremely bike friendly and pedestrian friendly. In contrast, thinking of the mall area in Christiansburg, you are almost risking life and limb if you try to cross the road from Walgreens to Starbucks for example. Sidewalks are non-existent in this area, despite the fact that it is a major shopping hub. The Huckleberry Trail is located at the mall, which is great, but I have to drive my bike there because I feel like riding my bike from my house 2 miles down Peppers Ferry Road would be a suicide mission. Speaking of bike paths, why are there not any bike paths going through downtown Blacksburg? And I’m sure I am not alone in saying that I cannot count how many times I have almost been hit by cars on campus.

I think by and large, the United States is overwhelmingly a culture built around cars, and this is part of the reason why there are food deserts. I was hoping that, with the rise in gas prices to over $4 a gallon in 2008, more pedestrian and bike friendly changes would be cropping up everywhere. But instead, at least where I have lived, I only saw many people complaining, travelling less, and more complaining. I was happy to see when I moved to Blacksburg that the city was full of cycling enthusiasts. But I find it is more of a hobby here than a way of life. In Montreal for instance, the city has a system of publicly available bicycles, BIXIBikes, that you can rent for almost no cost. There are more than 300 stations where you can take a bike out and return it to any other station in the city. Designated bike trails run through the entire city, off roads and beside roads. It is almost a hassle to own a car in many of the cities or towns where I have lived in Canada. I cannot say that about any place I have lived here. I often have to drive my bike somewhere in order to use it.

What does this all have to do with education? Well I think access is the key word here. Access to food, and transportation, healthcare facilities, education, libraires, and many other community amenities is tied into socio-economics. In short and simple terms, unequal access to food trickles down to all other aspects of life, including access to quality education.

Just watched Jane McGonigal‘s Gaming Can Make a Better World video. Pretty interesting talk and a novel idea that gaming can improve or even solve some of the world’s biggest issues. But I am skeptical of this idea that online gaming is beneficial on a large “let’s solve the world’s problems” scale. I wish Jane had touched more on how gamers would apply the 4 things (mentioned in the video) that they are “virtually” good at in real world scenarios. The examples she gave of “real” world problem video games were all in actuality, virtual. If you know something is not real, no matter how real it is simulated to be, I don’t think you can ever attach the same gravity of consequences and level of responsibility that an actual real situation would. Even if you are socially interacting with real people in online games, noone is actually going to die if you give the wrong advice or make the wrong decision. Virtual problem solving is so popular because it is just that…..virtual. I’m not convinced that it is possible to just jump over to reality in applying these virtual game skills and approaches to problems. Nor do I think it should be possible, lest we start under-appreciating real life consequences. I think oxymoron when I hear the term “virtual reality” because to me, they are two completely separate worlds.

This is not to say I am against virtual games, I do think they have benefits. They help us learn the mechanisms of problem solving and they provide an escape from the real world. I just don’t see the same level of benefits that Jane insists are present through online gaming. In fact I have the opposite view. In her article Be a Gamer, Save the World, Jane says “the real world just doesn’t offer up the same sort of carefully designed pleasures, thrilling challenges and powerful social bonding that the gamer finds in virtual environments”. Do you know the first things that popped into my mind when I read this?

Carefully designed pleasures: Picture a delisciously juicy fresh from the oven deer tenderloin, stuffed with goat cheese and rosemary, served with a cranberry port wine sauce. It was from a young buck that I got with my husband this past December that we butchered and processed at home. The pleasure as I cut into it and put the first juicy morsel in my mouth, the creamy goatcheese mingling with the earthy melt-in-your-mouth tenderness of the meat, dripping with sweet succulent sauce, is what comes to mind when I see this phrase. There is no way I would get this excited about any achievements in WoW, or even getting all acheivements for that matter.

Thrilling challenges: So I’m going to geek out here for a minute, but not virtually. I mean geek out in the real world. I think of my dissertation project as a thrilling challenge, really I do. I’m using a model to predict the effects of sea-level rise, it’s a novel model that incorporates dynamic sea-level rise, meaning it doesn’t just assume that everything will be flooded at a certain level of rise. It accounts for differences in groundwater levels, slope, elevation, substrate, vegetation, tide levels, and a myriad other variables that make sea-level rise a dynamic process. I am tempted to write pages more as I sit here blogging, truly I am. This is a thrilling challenge to me.

Powerful social bonding: I don’t know about you, but interacting socially online has never given me butterflies in my stomach, made me cry out of sheer joy, or made me think I can’t possibly live on without someone. I won’t discount this blog just yet, but so far, only some very important people in my real life have made me feel these strong emotions. This to me is powerful social bonding. Asking an online player to help you beat a mage is not.

I’m still going to try some of the games on  Jane’s website, and I will read further on her research. But at this point, I am not convinced that online gaming is all that and the real world is really that bad. Because to me, the real world is awesome and I am constantly amazed by its wonders. Maybe I am just too optimistic.

Convince me otherwise! I want to hear your stories about how you think online gaming can help make the world a better place. And particularly, how it fits into education and current pedagogical practices compared to practices that present students with real-world situations.

As I was watching the video “New Learners Of The 21st Century” https://video.pbs.org/video/1797357384/, I’m at once inspired and intimidated by the case studies showing new approaches to learning. I suppose the education revolution that these examples showcase is not all new, at least not in my last ten years of education as a university student. Since starting my undergraduate degree, classes that take place outside the traditional setting have been the norm in my field. Gaining a thorough understanding of wildlife conservation would be impossible without a heavy emphasis on field experience. So to see elementary and high school students getting outside and learning in non-traditional educational settings makes me very excited. But in the back of my mind, there is a lingering fear about this education revolution because despite the fun learning experience that is inherent in my current field, I feel like I have been beaten over the head with a traditional education to a point where I fear I would be a little at a loss with anti-teaching. I’ll explain exactly what I mean but first allow me to explain why I feel this way.

Elementary school for me consisted of classrooms full of starched uniforms and shoes scrubbed white. Not a hair was out of place and students only spoke when asked. The rest of the time, students were to sit in their chairs diligently taking in whatever the teacher was saying or writing on the blackboard (yes, we only had blackboards back then!). Discipline was paramount and no one dared challenge that. Much of my high school years were very much the same, except that we did have computer class, where instead of writing compositions with a pencil, we wrote compositions with a keyboard (fun fun). In every class, the emphasis was on good manners and curbing your enthusiasm because it was unladylike. This may sound antiquated but I am not exaggerating. I went to a private Catholic Girls School where nuns still taught some of the classes. We had no field trips, unless you count “retreat” where the highlight of our trip was writing our sins down on a piece of paper and burning it. We had designated times to be creative, like talent days that occurred about once every few months. Basically, I come from a schooling background that attempted to squash any inkling of creativity and instead focus the mind on memorization and writing skills. Thankfully I was a decent writer, but my memorization skills are probably to blame for me failing organic chemistry twice (yes twice).

But the moment I entered university, suddenly I found myself excelling in classes that involved field trips and emphasized learning through personal experience rather than recital and memorization. But I feel like my creative bone was badly broken from so many years of passively taking in whatever information was being handed to me at the time. It’s easy for me to think of how I would engage students and provide them with the tools to learn when it comes to wildlife conservation. Bring them out for a field trip of course! But the puck stops there. How on earth would I engage students in a statistics course? Or a course on conservation law? I feel a sense of fear and dread welling up in me just thinking about thinking of creative ways to engage students because creativity is not something that was ever encouraged over the course of my education, even up to this day. I am so excited to see that others are being so creative when it comes to education but there is that lingering fear in the back of my mind that I could never be on that level. How do you encourage creative thinking when you are not sure how to encourage it in yourself? I’m sure I am not alone in this thought.