A role for exogenous games?

May 11, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in education, games, linguistics

Last year, I was offered to teach a class called on grammar and structural linguistics, which I accepted with some hesitance because I considered it a bit outside of my comfort zone. I've taught sociolinguistics and communications courses before, but this is hardcore linguistics, requiring knowledge not just of grammar but also of how to analyze the syntactic structure of sentences using grammar trees. What made it even more intimidating was that these were four hour courses, and I had to make it interesting to the students. Games, then.

The Self-Imposed Challenge

May 05, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in education, games

I've often experimented with assessment in my classes. I once--somewhat masochistically--asked students to come up with questions for me to take as a midterm. (The point of it was to turn the idea of a midterm on its head, not to find out what students know, but what they don't know, and why. It's a very effective way of finding out gaps in their knowledge and be able to fill it quickly. It was a small class, fortunately, and I changed the format the next time round, asking the students to make their own midterms for each other.)

For all the talk about games-based learning and gamification of the classroom (not sure about the latter yet, will blog about it in due time), I'm surprised the question of assessment hasn't come up as often as it should have. If it does come up, it's usually in the form of using games as assessment (e.g., designing a game that demonstrates your understanding of something). Having worked with some assessment gurus in the past, I'm always pushing myself to rethink assessment and to avoid traditional forms of assessments like the plague, so a few ideas inspired by games have seeped into my head over the years.

Review: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

April 25, 2011 by Chia Yuan Hung in communication, technology

I was reading Delete by Victor Mayer-Schonberger when I recalled a movie with Robin Williams called The Final Cut, a forgettable pseudo-scifi movie about cameras being implanted in people that records everything they see, which Williams has to edit in order to cut out all the bad parts after people die so that they could preserve all their nice memories for those in mourning; this movie, which I had forgotten about until I read Mayer-Schonberger's book on the difficulties (and virtues) of forgetting in a digital age.