:Connecting the Dots

I saw “Intellagirl” Sarah Robbins give a keynote on Friday at the LHRIC Tech Expo and she spoke a lot about gaming, how the millennials learn, and how games may offer a glimpse at new ways to engage students in schools.  As far as I’m concerned, no new news there – I’ve been a gamer myself for some time and am well aware of how cognitively challenging games can be, and I’ve read James Gee and many of the others.

Then today I stumbled across Blizzard’s creative writing contest, in which entrants will submit stories that take place in the virtual worlds of Blizzard’s computer games.  Looking at this, I see even more clearly that the things we have to force kids to do in schools are things they might otherwise do willingly if given the chance to do so in ways that are meaningful to them.  Many students read and write fan fiction.  Why is it so hard to get them to write a five-paragraph essay of any quality?  They are enthusiastic about writing a story in a virtual world but not one that takes place in the “real” world of school.  Are we to assume then that the “real” world of school is so far removed from reality as to be completely foreign and uninteresting to them, even less so than the made-up world of Azeroth?

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As a former English teacher, I’ve always been a big fan of the visual thinking software Inspiration.  What a forward-looking application, just about the only one from the early nineties (with the possible exception of Geometer’s Sketchpad) that was open-ended, constructivist, multi-disciplinary, fun.  When everyone else was doing “drill and kill,” these guys recognized that computers could be a platform to support and scaffold thinking, writing, and collaboration.  Even now, 15 years later, I still sing Inspiration’s praises to English teachers, although in this age of the web, those songs had begun to sound a little tinny over the last few years.  New web-based apps like Google Docs, PBwiki, and Mindomo had a little more sheen and could support all kinds of collaboration among students and teachers.

Well, yesterday I learned that the online version of Inspiration, mywebspiration.com, is in beta and I’ve been playing with it on and off all day.  So far, I’m impressed by its responsiveness and its almost slavish adherence to the UI from the Windows/Mac version.  And they’ve added a slew of collaboration features, including versioning.  One of the problems with Inspiration has always been that kids can’t continue working on it at home.  No more, if MyWebspiration becomes a reality.

On the downside, it looks like a number of features from the Windows/Mac versions have been left out– at least in this phase in the beta.  Most notably, I couldn’t find any way to export my diagrams as image files or my outlines as RTF documents.  This is a huge omission, as I always argue that the ability to brainstorm in Inspiration and then quickly shoot it all into Word and start writing is one of the software’s main benefits.  Also, I didn’t see any “arrange” buttons to clean up my diagrams and it is way more difficult than it needs to be to paste text into a diagram.  But hopefully they will work these wrinkles out.  I know I’ll certainly be watching as this product develops in the coming months and I hope they’ll offer a reasonable upgrade price for current customers.

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