the Death of expression,
finally - the iron doors closed shut
and the liqueous. (my dicitionary lets me know how the world forgot the word “liqueous”, yet again)

yet you are legit -
being the politically correct manner,
in ways that define how uber you are
knowing the degraded joy of life that you seem
to keep

there is a world out there,
there is a huge world out there -
that you can know.

but you are too blind to be stuck in between,
its shouldn’t be this way -
it should never be.

yet, too less - too scant you cry,

you never try to be better and yet,
you blame me for being good,
what is your shame - you’re in the game.

Play it. 

Prisoner’s Dilemma
A biography of one of the most influential thinkers of the century tells how John von Neumann invented the digital computer and constructed a game theory called prisoner’s dilemma, which was often used as an allegory for the nuclear arms race.
Prisoner’s Dilemma

I’m in the slow process of formulating how my classroom will function next year. We have a new course theme, and I plan to overhaul quite a bit.

Among the changes I’m playing around with: rewriting my class to more closely resemble a large scale interactive gaming session, with levels, achievements, diverse reward systems, etc.

I’m not sure at this point what this will look like, and I’m drawing on a lot of sources for the project. This spring I enrolled in a course on game theory through Stanford’s open access online learning program. The course explored a lot of great material and should be tremendously helpful in thinking about different gaming models and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivational forces (esp. as they might apply in a classroom).

As the summer progresses I’ll be posting more about the project here. I’m nervous about the change. I find gaming has a fairly poor reputation among college faculty, for a variety of reasons. The knee-jerk reaction, that games must mean World of Warcraft and that if it does it must be a bad thing, fairly short sighted. Game theory is central to the study of economics systems, of which the classroom (and the university) are a part. Gaming can tell us a lot about behavioral psychology, and shifts in motivating structures can have a huge impact on something like retention in a freshman seminar.

Plus, games are fun. Well, sometimes games are fun. The most exciting part about game behavior (for me) is the way engaged gamers play through tremendous frustration in order to reach a set goal. This is very close to how I feel about learning: fun, exciting, and often deeply frustrating and compelling in the same moment. We lose a lot of students at “frustrating” because we fail to achieve ”compelling.” I’m hoping to shift that dynamic a little.

——

In the meantime:

Carnes, Mark C. “Setting Students’ Minds on Fire.” Commentary, The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 March, 2011. Web.

“Game Theory.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Rev: 5 May 2010. Web.

Jackson, Matthew and Yoav Shoham. “Game Theory.” Stanford University Coursera. n.d. Web.

Lehrer, Jonah. “The Eureka Hunt.” The New Yorker. 28 July 2008. p. 40. Print. [excerpt available online]

McGonigal, Jane. “Gaming Can Make a Better World.” TED. Mar. 2010. Web.

Polak, Ben. “Econ 159: “Game Theory.” Open Yale Courses. 2012. Web.

Salter, Anastasia. “Games in the Classroom: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.” ProfHacker, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Aug.-Oct. 2011. Web.

Schell, Jesse. “When Games Invade Real Life.” TED. Apr. 2010. Web.