cc  >> Good evening.  >> Good evening!  >> I'm Jim Perry.  I am the current president of  the Wisconsin Academy of  Sciences, Arts and Letters.  And it's my pleasure to welcome  you on behalf of this nearly  140-year non-profit organization  that is promoting intellectual  discourse and expression of  ideas throughout the state of  Wisconsin, connecting people and  ideas, as we say it.  I'd like to thank the media  partners that we have with us  tonight, to bring these programs  throughout the state of  Wisconsin for those who can not  attend the Academy Evenings,  including Wisconsin Public  Television, Wisconsin Eye,  18 cable stations and Portal  Wisconsin, where you can view  these programs on your home  computer.  We could not bring these events  to you, which bring the very  best of knowledge across the  many disciplines without the  support of our statewide  council.  And we have three of our council  members here tonight, Millard  Susman, who is the Vice  President for Sciences; Howard  Marklein who is our treasurer;  and Jim Armstrong who today was  elected the President-Elect of  the Wisconsin Academy of  Sciences, Arts and Letters, and  will follow me and do a heck of  a lot better job, I'm sure, in  the future.  So we have this council that met  today, about 25 people with us.  I'd have to say to you, we  depend upon your support in  order to bring Wisconsin Academy  Evenings throughout the state of  Wisconsin, most of which  actually take place here in the  Overture Center in Madison.  I happen to be from the Fox  Cities, so this is my road trip  of the week for me. 

 We'd also like to thank people  for generous support who make  these evenings possible, very  loyal sponsors, including the  Pleasant Rowland Foundation, the  Evjue Foundation, M&I Bank, the  Madison Community Foundation,  the UW-Madison Chancellor's  Office, the Wisconsin Alumni  Research Foundation, and many  others, who you may have seen on  one of the slides on the screen.  All of you should've received an  donor prize card when you  entered the room this evening,  which makes you eligible to  receive a free membership in the  Wisconsin Academy, but also  gives us an opportunity to hear  about topics that you might like  to hear about in the future.  So we would encourage you to  fill out these cards and return  them for a drawing for a free  membership.  Winners are notified via email.  This is the way we keep track of  you, of course.  And we hope that all the rest of  you will become members, as  well.  Again, the information on how to  become a member is on our Web  site.  You can ask me, or any one of  our council members for  information, or our Executive  Director Margaret Lewis, or the  editor of Wisconsin People and  Ideas, our award-winning  magazine, Jason Smith, who is  here tonight as well.  Any of us would be happy to  facilitate membership in the  Academy.  Now let me introduce our  speaker, Constance Steinkuehler,  Assistant Professor of  Educational Communication and  Technology. 

 The program is in the Curriculum  and Instruction Department at  this University of Wisconsin  flagship of Madison.  Dr. Steinkuehler will share with  us her research on learning and  literacy in massively  multi-layered online games.  Given our topics that we've had  in the past on bridging  political divides, and  encouraging greater  participation in the political  process, she may even be able to  share with us her ideas on how  the virtual world can  re-invigorate a new form of 21st  century citizenship.  Please join me in welcoming  Dr. Steinkuehler.  (applause)  >> Hi, thank you for coming.  First let me say thank you for  the invitation.  It's an absolute honor to be  here.  I tend to go through slides  fast, and talk a lot.  I love my topic.  But don't worry, we'll have  everything online and shared for  you. 

 Also, my phone is up here, but I  swear I'm not waiting for a  phone call, it's my timepiece.  Okay, we're in business.  All right, first I have to start  with the topic here, which is  "Learning and Virtual Worlds,"  and virtual worlds is this big,  grandiose way to talk about  spaces that are persistent,  online, two- or  three-dimensional, etc.  But truthfully, to put it  mundanely, I study something  called massively multi-player  online games.  Games, let me first start there.  So how many people here play  games of any time, console  games?  Of that population, how many of  you play online?  Okay, so a couple.  Good.  All right, don't worry.  Hopefully, this will still make  sense to an audience that  doesn't game necessarily.  But by the end, I hope that you  might think about it as a  pleasure. 

 All right, so games, when we  think about games, I don't know  about you, but I won't say my  age, but this is usually what we  think about.  We think about classic arcade  games that are fairly  simplistic.  Or, we think about Bejeweled.  I've put too many hours in  Bejeweled.  Thank God it's now actually just  now only on flights that I play  this game obsessively.  Or, we think about first person  shooters, right, lots of blood,  guts, and gore, and shoot 'em up  kinds of games.  But it turns out that while  people were not paying  attention, at least in older  generations, there really sort  of sprung up this massive field  of game design.  And there's incredible range and  variability in what games are  out there.  And for those of you who don't  game at all, games have boomed  as an industry in the last two  years, especially.  We're talking about 40% and 50%  growth per year. 

 So to give you an idea of the  range, there are games like  Madden Sports, actually a very  complicated game, even for  people who like football, like  me.  Games where all you do is  investigate things, like this is  a murder-mystery type game  called Siberia, in these  beautiful worlds.  You walk around these worlds and  try to actually solve some  puzzles in them.  Games like Civilization.  Any Sim players out there?  Anyone?  Civilization is fantastic,  especially for history buffs.  You get to play a civilization  for 4500 years and watch it  develop, thrive, go to war, etc.  Games, believe it or not, like  Chibe-Robo!  This is a popular role playing  game where you play a small,  little robot.  And do you know what you do in  this game?  You clean the house.  (laughter)  I'm not kidding!  And it's adorable.  It's an eight-hour game,  fabulous. 

 Who ever knew, you know, games  actually might teach your  children to clean their house.  There's something called  Chibi-Robo!  But there it is.  But also, forms of virtual life  that live on Nintendo DS screen,  little handheld mobile devices.  These are small, little puppies  that you can get on your  Nintendo DS.  Then you talk to them, and you  have to feed them.  It's sort of virtual life.  And also, things like, this is  Guitar Hero.  Rock Band just came out this  last Christmas.  Many of us spent too many hours  rocking out on Rock Band 2.  And here you can see that the  control is actually a guitar. 

 There are music theorists on  campus who use games like this  to teach very basic music  theory.  So they have a lot of potential.  And that's hopefully what I'll  talk about today.  Now, again, so there are all  these genres of games.  I'm going to talk about one in  particular.  So one genre, and that's the  massively multiplayer online  games.  So what in the world are these  games?  Well, I'm going to try to do  this quickly.  These are games that, the number  one thing that you need to know  is that they're played online,  and they're played with other  people.  So when you log in, other people  are logged in as well, and  they're characters and your  characters are running around  doing all sorts of adventures.  They're played in persistent  virtual worlds that are played  in real time. 

 So if I want to play with my  friends in say, Korea, I have to  get up at crazy hours, which  I've done, and they've done for  me.  They're perpetually accessible,  except when a server goes down.  So if it's 3:00am, and I can't  sleep, I can log on and play.  But they're typically known as  loosely structured by open-ended  fantasy narratives.  And the players are free to do  as they please.  So what this is like, is you end  up with these worlds where,  imagine a world where you have  princes, elves, ogres, demons  and dragons.  And yet, believe it or not, many  of the things people will do,  are play the mundanitys of  everyday life.  Sort of this notion of the  social-realistic, meaning that  after a while, people do things  like worry about crime, save for  homes, you know, engage in rote  behavior to work and earn up  some gold for themselves, and  buy equipment that they need.  So again, while there's this  sort of notion of escape as  fantasy, this loosely  structured, pseudo medieval,  typical kind of narrative,  there's also this sort of social  realism aspect.  How many people recognize this  logo?  Yeah. 

 World of WarCraft, let me tell  you, when I first started  studying online games, this was  one of the smaller, niche  markets of gaming.  They are games where you buy the  game, and then you have to pay a  subscription.  So some people played them, but  it was a lot of sort of like  online, kind of D&D type games.  In my career so far, World of  WarCraft came out in 2004,  April.  And this game is the most  successful computer game to ever  launch on a market.  So this game made MMOs,  massively multiplayer online  games, absolutely mainstream  overnight.  So what does it look like?  Here's an older map.  There's actually two more  continents on top now, because  the game company rolls out new  content every like, say year or  year and a half, in the form of  additional sort of territorial  land in the game.  So let me just walk through, if  you have never seen a game like  this before, what it looks like.  Because this long list of  definitions doesn't actually  capture what these games are  like. 

 All right, so here's a map, two  kingdoms, two continents.  So you can pick an area.  This is a kingdom over on the  eastern kingdoms.  You can go in closer.  So we're getting closer on this  kingdom.  Now I'm in the actual city of  Iron Forge.  This is a map for the city of  the alliance.  It's a massive metropolis.  I have been in this city where  there were Gay Rights parades.  (laughter)  Pick a spot on the map. 

 And when you play it, it looks  something like this.  So, let me pull up some tags  here.  You've got this sort of  complicated interface.  All of these buttons mean  something when you're playing  it.  And it's a way for me to control  my avatar, which is my sort of  central digital character.  And you'll see things like that  status up there of my health.  That tells me if she's okay or  if she's dying.  You've got a radar that helps  you navigate the virtual space.  So here you are in a world that  has this much to it.  And yet, it's played like this. 

 You know, one key thing to  notice is all of those little  guys behind my nice blonde  princess person, all those other  people are actual people at  keyboards controlling another  character.  We talk through text chat over  there.  Although now, things like World  of WarCraft, it's becoming  standard to have integrated into  it voice over IP.  So now, many of us have headsets  on, and talk to one another with  voice over IP technology.  Have I blown your mind yet?  The first time I logged on to  one of these games, it took me  like a month just to actually  get my head around the fact that  they exist.  They exist, people.  They're the metaverse, and they  are becoming, like World of  WarCraft is now considered the  new golf.  This is what people in tech  fields do as a way to sort of  hang out with their colleagues.  Okay, so let me show you what it  actually plays like.  Because you'll actually see how  chaotic it can get. 

 § §  All right, so what you're  looking at now is a video  tutorial.  So the big screen, all the  action in it, is videotape of  game play.  That's what game play looks like  when you're doing it.  Totally chaotic.  You have groups of say, 20 or 25  people, all working together to  solve really high-end content  that's difficult.  So there's a big dragon, and  you've got to figure out a way  to get 20 of us to take it down.  Now, the video that you're  seeing now is actually a  tutorial that a young player  made for other players to use,  to solve this particular hard  content.  So you're seeing it's scored to  music.  It's edited.  You're seeing sidebars pop up  that give strategic information. 

 This is just absolutely  mind blowing for someone in  EdTech, because if any of you  ever built a software and rolled  it out, and actually put the  user manual with it, and found  out that no one reads the user  manual.  So you make an online tutorials,  and you find out that no one  goes through your online  tutorials.  Having been in this position,  it's mind blowing in the first  place, that fans voluntarily  build these materials for one  another, share them online, and  that you know, this is  considered sort of a cottage  industry that they do for free  for the game that they love.  So again, if it looks chaotic  and complicated, good.  It is chaotic and complicated.  So, in case you're not convinced  yet, these virtual worlds are  significant.  If you just look at the  populations of people playing  these games on the four titles  that I happen to study in my  research, and my four titles by  the way are in no way the only  titles.  There are dozens and dozens of  MMOs out there, actually.  But if you add these up, lineage  up is an old Korean game I  studied, and then it's sequel.  World of WarCraft, you can tell,  it's the big one. 

 It's actually 12 million, I  think.  Runescape is the most popular  one, with the youth generation.  You end up with a population  somewhere around  13.5 million.  That's like 2.5 times  Wisconsin.  So whereas, ten years ago these  were obscure, now they're  becoming more and more  mainstream.  Economically, they're quite  significant, as well.  So it turns out that, this is  hard to actually believe.  But it turns out that they're is  a cottage industry online of  buying and selling virtual  goods.  So in the game, there is a  virtual economy.  You earn gold. 

 You can use the gold to buy  equipment.  And you get the gold from  killing monsters that somehow  have loot in their pockets that  you get.  It's wonderful.  So it turns out that there's a  whole industry that's built  around these games, illegally.  You're not supposed to do it.  But where people are willing to  buy and sell virtual currency  for real dollars.  So for example here, this is on  a site called IGE, which is one  of the main corporations doing  it.  And if you're interested in this  saga, and this soap opera story  behind IGE, you should read  Julian Dibbell's recent article  on Wire that documents it.  It's fascinating.  But here, what you're seeing is  someone willing to sell. 

 This company is selling 300 gold  in World of WarCraft for the  cost of about $20.  Well, guess what, when you  start doing that, it turns out  you can get an exchange rate,  right?  And once you have an exchange  rate, you can start talking  about the virtual economies.  So it turns out that Ted  Castronova, who's at Indiana,  did this in 2001.  I don't know, these are old  stats, you can tell.  I don't know what the stats are  now that our economies are  tanking.  It could be that the virtual  ones are tanking, too.    But not that I've seen, which  says something, right?  But he did a study of this  world.  This is to EverQuest, another  MMO.  And guess what he found out?  He found out that in fact, the  world he studied was the 77th  largest economy in the real  world in 2001, that it had a GNP  per capita, at that time,  between Russia and Bulgaria.  Then it's platinum piece, its  currency, traded at that time on  the market, higher than both the  Yen and the Lira. 

 See, to an economist, it doesn't  matter if it's a virtual piece  of gold.  That's no different than a  domain name.  It's no different than a  diamond.  It's no different than any other  thing that has no inherent  value.  We just decide what the value  is, right?  So it turns out that these  economies are huge and robust.  And they're huge and robust, not  just in terms of virtual  economies online.  I'm talking in terms of real  dollars.  I probably have, I started  studying this in 2001, I  probably have assets of  somewhere around like say,  $18,000-$22,000 in the virtual  goods that I have through these  games.  All right, time significant.  That's fairly significant, as  well. 

 So time investment, this results  from the Kaiser Foundation that  came out.  I think this was 2006.  But if you look at the average  amount of time that young people  spend doing something like  homework, it's about 50 minutes  a day.  Gaming?  It's about equivalent.  So, for someone like me in the  School of Education, you have to  start taking seriously the  amount of time that kids are  engaged in these kinds of  activities.  That's not why I study them,  though.  I don't study them because lots  of people play them, or because  there's money to be made, or  because kids do a lot of it.  Although, maybe because kids do  a lot of it.  One of the reasons I've been  studying them for a while, is  that in my estimation, they're  actually intellectually  significant.  Hopefully, I will convince you  of part of this by the time I  leave. 

 But they're intellectually  significant in my work.  So I started off in 2001.  I did a two-and-a-half-year  ethnography of lineage one and  lineage two.  These are games that, at that  time, were the number one titles  on the market.  This is that moment where my  entire dissertation has been  boiled down to a series of  statements for you.  Everyone have a solemn moment.  There it is.  So those are my main findings.  Oh, God, it was painful.  All right, from that point on,  my work, I should say, is funded  by the MacArthur Foundation and  by the Academic ADL Co-Lab here  locally. 

 And with their funding and  resources, I've been able to  sort of test out some of the  hypotheses that emerged from  this initial ethnography.  So right now, the things that my  research group and I study are  really focused down on these  thread.  So we're really interested in  what kind of media literacy  practices are involved with this  kind of game play.  What are the informal science  practices involved?  Things like computational  literacy, where you're talking  about, how do kids come to  understand how to build  computational solutions to  problems.  That's more than just  information literacy, or IT  skills.  IT skills are not even close to  what we need.  IT skills, like how do you turn  your computer on, done.  Kids don't need to know that.  What kids are trying to figure  out now is how do I program this  widget to solve my problem.  Things like reciprocal  apprenticeship have to do with  how peer groups are teaching one  another how to master various  aspects, whether it's coding for  a mod in a game, or how to write  fan fiction better, which is  some of Rebecca Black's work. 

 Or you know, how to test out  hypotheses on data sets.  How our kids, they're actually  peer-to-peer learning in these  environments.  And this last dangling one is an  odd one, I know.  I'll touch on that at the end.  I'm only going to pull out one  or two of these, because I want  to go into some depth, so I can  convince you that there's some  substance here, which is  daunting, but we'll go.  So first let me talk to you  about the science work that we  do here.  So we've been looking at, let me  start off with what motivated  this.  In this large ethnography that I  conducted, I ran into one  summer, where I had a high  schooler that was one of my key  informants, involved with this  other group of boys.  They were, you know, the boss  monster I showed you, and all  these people running around  trying to kill the boss monster,  which was a dragon.  So in the game at the time, a  different game, but they were  trying to solve this. 

 And they were having a debate  about what arrangement, plus  people, plus items and  equipment, like which weapons  and which, you know, what gear  you should wear.  So they started to, I'm not  kidding, gather data in the game  and put it into Excel files.  They tried all the different  permutations that you could do,  every combination.  Then they created little  mathematical models to capture  which were more effective.  Then they argued about these  mathematical models.  These are high schoolers in  summer.  So when I went to my informant,  and I was watching them do this,  I was like, do you realize what  you're doing is like the essence  of model based reasoning.  This is like a science teacher's  dream to have happen in your  advanced science classes.  Well, what you're doing is  saying here's a complex  phenomenon, and I'm going to  build a model and see if my  model predicts what the system  will do.  It's really hard to accomplish  in science classes. 

 It turns out, they're doing it  for fun in the game.  And when I told them this was  science, their response was  really odd.  They were like, no, we're not.  We're just trying to cheat  the game.  (laughter)  Which is really interesting.  So I thought, well, I want to  know, how prevalent are these  practices.  I should also say, this is part  of the reason why we start to  worry.  (laughter)  You know, there are ways in  which we kind of had a good  jaunt, a good eight years of a  pseudo anti-science kind of  administration.  I'd like to say this is now why  we can all exhale.  Whew. 

 We're pretty sure that it's  going to change, which is  hilarious, because it's change  we can believe in.  But we started off with this  general notion, going back to  Poincaré, right?  So, you know, his famous quote  that, "Science it built up of  facts, as a house is built of  stones, but an accumulation of  facts is no more science than  a heap of stones is a house."  What's his point?  His point is that science is not  merely the accumulation of  content knowledge.  Science is also about these kind  of practices and dispositions  that scientists have and use  toward understanding the world.  Now, in studying something like  online games, all right, I'm  never going to be able to argue  that kids are somehow learning  something like the periodic  table, right.  I'm not crazy.  They're not learning the  periodic table.  But what they are learning is  some interesting inquiry  practices.  So that's what I wanted to go  for.  How can we talk about these  practices of inquiry.  So we started with AAAS  standards for scientific habits  of mind, for what it's worth. 

 This is kind of the document  that became national standards,  and therefore state standards in  many ways.  And we started looking at the  forum communities around games.  Well, first let me explain that  at this point, there were 21  forums, official forums.  There are many, many more  unofficial forums around  WarCraft.  But it's a nice data set to  poll, because it's stable.  And it's also where I saw some  of the boys doing their initial  work in debating their theories  about the game.  So we had some reason to believe  that this might be a good place  to look for science reasoning.  We ran a pilot on one of  threads.  It was very provocative.  We saw some people doing some  really interesting practices  around model based reasoning,  about theories and testing  evidence. 

 But we also ran into a really  curious kind of tenor that was  used in these conversations,  too.  That was sort of like, it  reminded me of reverse  engineering.  So we looked at the forums, and  said, well, they're doing  interesting stuff.  But the conversations, and we  just pulled a small amount of  data, like one discussion out of  50,000.  And it looked in this  discussion, as though people  were treating knowledge as  though there was one truth,  there was an algorithm to find.  And they were the person that  typically had it, right.  Well, science doesn't work that  way.  Science actually works in a very  different sort of a  epistemological stance, if you  want to call it that.  But I wanted to make sure that  we weren't capturing what really  was reverse engineering,  which was "cheating,"  and calling it science.  So we ran a full investigation  on another randomly  selected thread,  pulled about 2,000 posts. 

 This gives you a confidence  interval of around 9%.  So it's a good, solid  representative sample.  For the players, this is  pre-Burning Crusade, so this is  right before launch of Burning  Crusade.  Analytic framework, not very  interesting.  Let me parse it out.  We had, number one, codes that  looked at discursive practices.  And by that, I meant, do you  have a theory; do you use  evidence to back up your theory;  do you know how to counter argue  against someone else's evidence;  do you know how to reference  other resources, meaning that  you can cite other people's work  as duplicating yours.  The second sort of tier and type  of code was really about model  based reasoning, which I've  talked some about.  And the third one was this tacit  epistemology.  So this is really trying to get  at, are you treating knowledge  like it's certain; that it  simply accumulates; that there's  no sort of debate about it; are  you relativistic; do you believe  that it's a free for all and  even the experts don't know; or  are you more evaluative. 

 And it's this last one,  evaluative, is what you want for  a science kind of discussion.  And by the way, these all sort  of come out of the AAAS  standards.  So here's what we found.  Let me walk through some of  these, to give you an idea of  kind of what this is telling us.  So first, the biggest question I  had is, is the talk even  productive.  I mean, remember, I'm looking at  what youth do, not because  they're asked to do it by  teachers in classrooms.  I'm going out to their play  spaces and basically, like, you  know, I'm lurking and gathering  data and seeing what they do  spontaneously for fun.  So, is the talk productive?  Well, 86% of it turned out to be  social knowledge construction.  On a good day, I would've  estimated around a third.  So this is way, way more than we  expected. 

 It turns out that  overwhelmingly, gaming  communities use their forum  spaces to do problem solving  together, is what it's saying.  And it's funny, because I really  expected a lot of social banter,  a lot of hey, dude, what's up.  You know, and that's what I kind  of expected.  And only 8% was social banter.  That's not to say that there was  no social banter, right.  But it'd be like, hey, dude,  you're a jerk, let me show you  my math, word.  You know, it was sort of like in  between all this kind of  adolescent, hyper-masculine  jibber-jabber was actual work.  What did this look like?  Well, typically what these  threads looked like is someone  would say, I wonder what gear a  shadow priest should have at  level 45, if you're doing X,  right.  Some very detailed question.  And then someone would post an  answer. 

 There'd be some sort of  discussion around that answer  and some back and forth.  Then someone would maybe post a  second, alternative answer, and  then there'd be some discussion  back and forth.  And at the end, there would  either be A, some sort of  summary, or someone would say,  obviously the first one's better  because of blah.  Or you would have it just sort  of peter out as though the last  answer given was the right one.  And if you actually looked at  the computations and stuff, they  were, I would say that they were  mostly right.  Like when they petered out and  it was the last answer, it was  usually closer to the true one.  All right, so inside this 86%,  within that 86%, we had about  equal parts were either building  on each other's ideas or using  counter arguments.  It makes sense, right?  If you're going to continue a  discussion where you're solving  a problem, you're either going  to agree with each other and  build on each other's knowledge  or you're going to refute it.  You have about 28% using data  and evidence.  This is amazing. 

 My early work was on  argumentation in everyday life.  Argumentation in online sites.  This is a very high number.  People don't typically  spontaneously offer evidence to  back up their claims.  Yeah, I know.  It'd be nice, wouldn't it.  Okay, some other interesting  stuff.  Model based reasoning, that  second category.  So about 58% was focused on  understanding a system.  That included understanding  systems of complicated systems  of feedback. 

 About 10% was actually offering  a model of the sort that I was  talking to you about.  So kind of saying, here's my  model that I think is the right  model.  And of those, half of those who  offered a model, actually  offered some form of test or  prediction as a way to say that  their model was the right one.  This is way off the hook  sophisticated for high  schoolers, by the way, actually  for everyday people, but we'll  talk about that in a minute.  So way down here at the very  bottom, you have 4% actually did  some mathematics, they were  mathematizing the system.  And 1% actually did their  derivations or computation  online, on the post.  All right, so let me walk you  through an example post.  And by the way, yes, these  numbers look low.  So let me show you a little bit  about it.  An example post. 

 Read silently.  No, I'm totally kidding.  Is she going to make us read  that?  No.  All right, so let me walk  through what's here.  This is a post about midway  through one of the discussion  threads.  And he starts off by saying,  "The unfortunate fact is there's  no shadow nuke..."  And then he goes on.  So shadow nuke is an abbreviated  shorthand for characters of a  certain class in the game don't  have a spell that's super  powerful, like a nuke spell.  So social knowledge  construction.  This whole thing is social  knowledge construction because  right now, he's building on an  idea that's been working on this  thread.  It goes on to say, "I put  together my own spreadsheet  which goes into more detail and  takes into account exactly what  happens to spells with regard  to talents..."  Two systems in the game that  intersect, very complicated  systems. 

 And then he gives, you know,  this URL to it.  He goes on and says,  "feel free to email me... but  if you read up at wowwiki.com...  and the coefficients used in the  theorycraft, you'll find that  I'm consistent."  WowWiki is a collective wiki.  Everyone knows what a wiki is.  So it's a collective text that  the gaming communities put  together as a homegrown manual  to the game.  And the theorycraft is a mod.  It's a piece of software that  actually scrapes data off the  game and computes on it and puts  it out.  So this is what I mean by  referencing outside resources.  He's actually fact checking  himself against others in this  world.  Finally, "If flay were empowered  to the point that it received  65% of +damage, then shadow  would be up around 45% dps  scaling. 

 That would be quite respectable  considering..."  Blah, blah, blah, right?  What is this?  You know, I have a PhD.  I'm fairly well educated.  I've been studying games  since 2001.  I play a priest, and it took me  quite a while to understand  what he was talking about here.  He's talking about a fairly  nuanced scaling system  in the game.  Okay, but one thing to say here.  He's saying, if you change one  variable, here's the outcome.  If you empower to the point  that it receives 65% of the  +damage, then shadow would be  up here.  Now, let's go back to the model.  What does this model look like?  This model that we had a low  number for?  It looks like that. 

 Yeah, so even though the  mathematical modeling was only  4% of the data set, it's a very  note worthy 4%, right?  Even though the mathematical  computations were only 1%,  it's on this level.  I have a degree in math, and  this is really difficult for me.  And most of the people playing,  I would argue probably don't  have a degree in math.  All right, tacit epistemologies,  that last weird category.  So this is the findings  that we have.  Let me walk them through.  Absolutist is 30%, and are the  kind of statements like, whose  mom believes that shadow, blah,  blah, blah.  This sort of attitude that's a  little bit cavalier, as though  there's obviously a right  answer, and it's stupid to  debate it.  You would never hear scientists  acting that way, I don't think.  So 5% relativist, the kind of  thing where it's just opinion. 

 The experts don't agree.  So, sort of saying why debate  this, why worry about a model,  when in fact it's like you say  po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to.  So 5% of that.  Evaluative is the one that we  want.  Ding, ding, ding.  And that's the kind of treatment  that says I see your point here,  but I wonder if, blah, blah,  blah.  I should also say, let me frame  all this the right way.  So 27% of the posts, we could  not tell.  So those 27%, we set outside as,  we just can't tell.  In my research group, if we  can't code something, we can't  code something. 

 So we put in a no, can't code  bucket, all of our can't codes.  So the remaining 73% of the  data, these are the percentages.  Here's why you should care.  Compared to Deanna Kuhn's work,  that looks at everyday reasoning  in America, these are the  numbers that she found.  She found that 50% of Americans  hold an absolute view, that  there is one big truth about the  world, and typically, it's  theirs.  All right?  No one believes there's a big  truth, but that it's somebody  else's.  See the problem with this model?  This does not get you very far  in actually building knowledge  about something.  Relativist doesn't really  either.  It's rather annihilistic.  It's to say, who cares, it's a  free for all. 

 There is no, we can't establish  anything.  So in her data, only 15% of  Americans, this is 1991, but  actually have an evaluative  view, who treated knowledge that  was worth rolling up your  sleeves and manhandling.  So when you compare that to our  numbers, it's a fairly stark  contrast.  Now, of course, you've got a  chicken/egg problem that we're  trying to figure out now, and  I'll talk about it later.  But you've got a chicken/egg  problem.  So is it that people who tend to  worry about knowledge go to  forums and games to do it, or is  it forums around games generate  a culture that fosters this kind  of thinking and performance in  people.  And probably it's somewhere in  that murky middle, right?  But I will say that posts that  are not of much substance, it  better at least be funny, or  you'll be ridiculed off the  post, right?  So I think it remains to be  seen.  So we're trying to do  longitudinal work.  But in the meantime, you're  seeing that here's this culture  around online games, fantasy  spaces, silly stuff, right?  So we think.  What you're seeing is  communities doing academic work  of the sort you might want to  see in classrooms, of the sort  you might want to see in various  in formal and informal learning  environments. 

 Compared to schools.  Well, here's something to be  depressed about.  One in five Americans is  considered scientifically  illiterate, despite mandatory  instruction in science in our  schools.  All of us had to go through  science.  One in five can actually do  something like read the Tuesday  New York Times and understand  it.  Why is that?  Why is it that we have mandatory  instruction in science and yet  our rates are pretty abysmal.  Well, there's a lot of reasons.  Like most problems, there's a  lot of reasons.  One of them has to do with the  fact that, you know, in science  classes, you have these inquiry  activities, you have labs, like  chemistry labs.  You have biology labs. 

 You have physics labs now, which  we never got to do.  I'm too old.  So in these labs, for most  teachers, this is sort of the  place where the teachers get to  engage kids in hands-on inquiry.  Finally, for most science  teachers, they will say,  finally, they love their labs  because they get to get the kids  doing science.  Well, here's the sad facts.  The sad facts is that we've been  looking at things like labs, and  it turns out they not only do  not science or engender science,  they actually engender views  that are antithetical to  science.  It makes a teacher cry or drink.  But here's why.  If you think about, there's a  logic to it.  So when you're a high schooler,  or you're college kid in a lab,  you know, your attitude is that  there is one right answer. 

 And that's the one that the  teacher has.  And you re-do your experiment  with your colleagues until you  get it to match the one right  answer that the teacher has.  And it turns out, that's not how  science works.  There is no one right answer.  There's how well you did the  process, and then comparing your  results with other people.  Well, we're not able to do that  very well in science.  So what's curious here is that  you have this space that's kind  of a free for all in many ways,  right?  It's a play video game space.  And yet, people are  spontaneously, for their own  pleasure, engaging in these  forms of inquiry that are so  difficult to have happen in  things like labs.  All right, back to my main  theories here.  I have to keep watching my time,  because I talk a lot. 

 Can you tell?  So let me work through a couple  more.  I want to talk about digital  media literacy really quickly.  And I'm going to go short here.  So some of my early work, I  actually documented.  For those of you who are not  aware, there is a long history  in this state, so about every  couple years where we go through  this sort of literacy crisis,  this literacy scare, where  you'll see lots of text, things  like editorials in the New York  Times bemoaning how children  don't read, how the youth  generation, you know, doesn't  understand, doesn't engage  books, etc.  Some of my early work was simply  documenting that even if you  take a very conservative view of  literacy, of nothing more than  reading and writing print text,  which is a fairly conservative  view, even if you look at it  that way, it turns out that  games require an immense amount  of literacy work to even be able  to succeed at them.  So one of the things we're doing  right now is trying to say,  okay, so if we know that games  involve all of these literacy  practices within the game,  literacy practices outside of  the game, things like wikis,  manuals, video tutorials, forum  discussions, where you do  debates.  If all of these things are  happening around games, what can  we try to say about the nature  of those literacy practices and  their quality.  That's what we're trying to  tackle now.  So I'm going to give you a slice  of really early data of what  this looks like. 

 So, we're doing like a network  analysis to start.  And we're starting with a seed  set of 25 expert game player  interviews and 21 novice.  What we do is we sit down with  them and we say, list to  exhaustion all of the resources  you use playing WoW.  So we sit them down at a game  and we say we want to see  everything that you use.  So that's the seed set that  we're starting with, to see what  do people use.  It's one thing to say what's  online.  But that doesn't tell you what's  actually frequently accessed.  Curiously, here's the breakdown,  which is really interesting.  Because 46%, almost half of  those information resources are  expository and procedural text.  Now for anyone in student K-12  standards, expository and  procedural texts are the most  difficult texts for youngsters  to read, typically. 

 So this is probably the most  advanced kind of text you can  look at.  So this is the majority of text  around games.  Some of this other stuff is  things like team coordination  would be the orange.  The red, 14% is mods, like  computational mods that they're  building.  Player production, 7%, is things  like writing fan fictions, fan  videos, fan artwork.  So an overwhelming majority of  the text is actually expository.  So what we're doing is calling  up various analytic frameworks  and throwing them at the data.  Let me show you what it looks  like.  I'm going to call up one node  off this network.  So here's a page from something  called WoW Head. 

 WoW Head is a complex  database-backed Web site that  players use all the time to play  this game.  So when you're playing World of  Warcraft, there's a general chat  that goes out to everyone in  your area.  And let's say, you're trying to  figure out where to find iron  ore.  General chat.  Where do I find iron ore.  Long pause.  Next response back.  WoW Head.  And the reason that they respond  WoW Head, is what they're saying  is go look it up.  Look it up, right?  It's WoW Head or Thought Bot. 

 This is the standard kind of  resource used in gaming.  And most players over 20, if  they're not using these kinds of  resources, can't actually  succeed in the game.  So, if we break it down.  So here is us having stripped  away color, advertisements, and  all of that, to break down the  schematic of what these  resources are like.  You've got a complex interplay  of text, symbols, images, etc.  They're thoroughly multinodal.  You have data, complex data,  that's actually been scraped off  the game from UI mods, so  software programs that go and  scrape data from the game and  then re-present it back in these  databases.  Then you have a bottom section  that is user-authored  commentary.  So here's some data from the  game, and you have people  discussing how that quest should  be done, or what these data  mean, or whether or not it's  accurate.  This text, for what it's worth,  so far, is a really interesting  mixture of all four basic genres  that we would usually use in  school. 

 But here's kind of an analysis  of what this text means.  That's nice.  Fancy glancy.  Lexical analysis.  So what kinds of words, if we  just treated this as vocabulary  wording, what would we find out?  Well, 3% of it is A-W-L words,  these are academic words that  are considered on the list of,  when you're a literacy teacher,  there's this list of words that  are in academic books across all  different domains.  So they're domain general  academic language, 3% of the  language is academic.  Almost 16% is what Jim Gee calls  specialized discourse.  I'm sorry, these academic words,  I put down here.  So you see things like  economical, obtainable,  requirement, restoration.  These are considered like  academic words, like if you were  trying to teach vocabulary  language to kids. 

 Reading level.  What's the reading level?  The SMOG test puts the reading  level at 11th grade, which is  fairly interesting.  I work with boys, who I'll talk  about in a minute, who read  around the 4th to 7th grade, yet  they are reading 11th grade text  here, which is curious.  Here's the best part of this.  What does this mean?  So a SMOG reading level of 11,  means educational level,  some high school.  An example would be something  like Sports Illustrated.  You know what my favorite part  of this graph is?  Sports Illustrated is a higher  level than Newsweek.  (laughter)  That's the big buried lead on  that one.  I'm like, really?  Sports Illustrated is a higher  reading level?  But 11th grade is a fairly  decent reading level, especially  for some of the kids I work  with.  And the other thing is that, so  you can also tie these texts,  texts that look like this,  actually tie quite well to  things like standards, national  standards. 

 So these are the National  Council for Teachers of English  Language Arts, the technology  standards, etc.  So part of what we're doing is  saying if these are the  materials that kids are reading  around games, what reading level  is it at?  What's the language vocabulary  in them?  What's the general kind of  difficulty of text.  And what possible standards do  they tie to?  And it holds up quite well,  frankly.  Collective problem solving.  Say a few words about this.  I'm going to go back to science.  Remember the science that I  talked about?  Notice I don't say  collaborative.  I say collective.  What is that about?  Well, let's go back to the  science forum stuff.  This is a graph of number of  posters versus number of posts. 

 This is the number of individual  texts that were put up on the  threads versus the number of  posters involved.  And what you see is a near  complete linear relationship.  The point here is that this  could be a situation where you  had 12 highly intelligent,  highly motivated game players  doing some awesome science  stuff, and everyone else just  kind of watching, all right.  That could be the case.  We looked for that in our data.  It is absolutely the opposite of  what you see.  What you see here is that for  each person involved, they made  1.8 posts.  So there is almost a 1:2 ratio  between people and posts.  It's to say that you have a lot  of people doing small,  incremental amounts of work.  Isn't that fascinating?  Because you could have found a  couple people, and everyone else  just sort of zoned out, going  hey, cool. 

 Not the case at all.  So this is what I mean by  collective, not collaborative.  This is not a small group of  people working together.  This is masses and masses  working together.  Collective intelligence is not  hive mind.  So Pierre Lévy, Henry Jenkins  and others have really been  talking a lot about collective  intelligence lately.  It's quite the buzz.  Collective intelligence is the  idea that knowledge gets  distributed across the social  network.  So, it turns out that I don't  have to know everything about  genetics.  I have a new friend who knows  something about genetics. 

 So if I have a genetics  question, I ask them.  It's actually more efficient  than me trying to be an expert  in genetics.  It's more efficient, in many  ways, to store knowledge in  devices, in books, and in people  around you, than to try to store  it all in your head.  It simply is.  I mean, no one has that big of a  memory capacity.  Now this is not hive mind,  though.  Hive mind is an idea where all  of us know the same thing, and  all of us believe the same  thing, and we're part of the  Borg.  Collective intelligence is not  hive mind.  Collective intelligence says,  you know, I know something about  horses, about knitting and about  video games.  You know something about  genetics, and you know something  about knitting horses. 

 You know something about horses  that don't knit.  We know each other, and the  knowledge is distributed out  across the social network.  Now, there are some problems to  this.  It means that, first you need  access to the social network,  don't you?  You need to have a friend of a  friend of a friend who knows  something about the question  that you have.  But it's a very interesting way  that youth cultures online are  starting to self-organize.  They're organizing around  principles of collective  intelligence.  Where again, what you see is  lots and lots of people  contributing to a problem, not  one or two centers of knowledge.  And whether we like it or not, I  don't think we even know the  repercussions of this.  And Henry Jenkins and Pierre  Lévy really, really tout the  benefits.  And I've seen them. 

 I think they're amazing.  But I think the jury is totally  out to see what's going to  happen in this environment.  That's just me.  But in case we think that this  kind of self-organizing is just  for fun and games, think again.  Because let me tell you.  Anyone paying attention to  Obama's neighbor-to-neighbor  tool, has anyone used this?  Totally amazing.  I really get excited about this  kind of thing, because Obama's  neighbor-to-neighbor tool, is a  tool where they had a database  of information, let's say about,  my neighborhood is Westmorland,  over in the near west side.  Nice little neighborhood.  So, they have information about  the Westmorland neighborhood.  I can type in my address, get a  six block radius around my house  that tells me who voted democrat  last time and who needs to have  me go to their door, who's  undecided, on the fence; who  hasn't voted for two terms; who  voted for McCain, etc. 

 I can print this.  It gives me the data in the form  of a map.  I can print that off and  literally walk around door to  door and solicit, and find out,  to know who you're going to vote  for.  Okay, so you're somewhat sure  you're going to vote for McCain,  okay, thank you.  I can go and actually update  their database, load the data  back up into the database and  keep this collective  intelligence going.  So when people talk about  Obama's campaign, how they had a  great ground game.  This is part of how they had a  great ground game.  And what I'm trying to say is  that these kinds of crazy  looking Web sites are doing  structurally the same practices  as what Obama's  neighbor-to-neighbor tool is  doing.  So lest we think that these  forms of activity are just fun  and games, they're not.  In fact, they actually elected  presidents. 

 A final word about pop  cosmopolitanism.  And I was going to talk about my  after school program, but I'll  talk about that some other day.  Pop cosmopolitanism.  So what's the point here?  Part of this is that I want us  to keep this in mind.  Kids and young adults are not  going to games to go do some  intellectual collective  intelligence work, right?  They're not going to games for  that.  They're going to games for the  fun of it, but also because  these are the new third place.  So this dream that we had of  Cheers.  My generation sat around by  ourselves on couches watching  other people have friends  online.  Sound familiar?  There's this fantasy of the  third place.  Most European cities have it. 

 Since post World War II, most  American cities were really  designed to really no longer  have third places.  These are spaces where you're  allowed to do informal  sociability.  It's where everyone knows your  name, right?  But nobody has to get too tied  up in each other's business.  Okay, so this third place, this  is the new one, right?  This is what kids are doing.  Kids and young adults are using  these virtual spaces to hang out  with one another and engage with  one another in informal sociable  ways, to hang out.  Why does that matter?  Well, while they're doing that,  they're building up their  bridging social network.  Bridging social capital.  I want to say a few words about  this.  So I did some work with a media  effects scholar.  And we did some studies on how  are these spaces functioning  socially. 

 Because it turns out that most  people go for the game, then  stay for the people.  Bridging social capital.  There's two forms of social  capital in sociology work on  capital.  There's bonding and there's  bridging.  So bonding is the form of social  capital you have with your best  friends, your partners, your  brothers and sisters, your  family, your very, very close  dear friends.  People that provide you a lot of  emotional support throughout a  life span.  Bridging is the opposite.  Bridging is the kind of capital  where you probably don't share  that many details of your life.  You go to movies together.  You like talking to them over  coffee. 

  You hang out with a beer.  You may call them every once and  a while to go to a movie, but  you wouldn't call them if your  child is in the hospital.  So why does this matter?  Well, bonding social capital,  it's very good.  We Americans love bonding  relationships.  Family, family, family.  But bonding social capital, it's  very tight capital that's great  for emotional support.  But it turns out that those  people look like you.  They act like you.  They have the same social class  as you, the same ethnicity as  you.  They often share genes with you. 

 They have the same world views  as you.  Bridging social capital are far  more access to diversity.  This is where we meet people  that don't look like us, don't  have the same social class,  don't watch the same books, etc.  And it turns out that things  like exposure to new art is  through bridging relationships,  not bonding.  Things like job opportunities  are through bridging, not  bonding.  You're more likely to hear about  it from a colleague or from  somebody you went to the bar  with, or somebody, you know, you  hung out, it's hard to find a  place here.  Thank God that Madison is good  at this, right?  So, somebody that you hung out  with at Nick's or at the Union,  or whatever, that you ran into.  You're more likely to find out  about a good job opportunity  through them than through your  mom.  All right, so why does this  matter?  Well, remember, there's a long  trend of online, we were talking  about this at dinner.  There's a long history, as long  as we've been studying the  Internet, of people going  online. 

 And it turns out too, that  people tend to read the news  sources that agree with their  world view.  We read the articles, blogs and  news sources, the materials that  tend to reflect back the world  as we believe it.  I don't go to Rush Limbaugh's  site.  Fact.  So here's the Internet, where we  tend to do that.  Yet, here's one place where  people actually go to game, and  then end up hanging out with  other people who have different  views.  And how this typically happens  is that you play the game, you  play the game, you play the  game.  You get some expertise in it.  You start making more and more  friends.  You really can't progress unless  you pair up with people. 

 You pair up with them, but  you're avatars.  You don't know their gender.  You don't know their age.  You don't know their location.  But after a while, you play with  them.  You build up a friendship.  You have some trust.  You hang out.  You like playing together.  You friend each other. 

 You can list each other.  And then you start, you get good  enough in the game where you go  out to play, but you start just  talking.  So how was your day?  Oh, that's cool.  Did you watch the debates?  Yeah.  You know, that's where it  starts.  So that's part of what people  are doing.  So this notion of pop  cosmopolitanism.  I hope someone in the audience  gets this slide.  This is what we're trying to get  our heads around now.  Because part of what's so  interesting to me is that I am  from a very small town in  Missouri. 

 When I grew up, my world was  very small.  The first international trip I  took was in my early 20s.  It was a very long journey.  Yet, kids now are growing up not  jut online with digital tools,  they're growing up in thoroughly  networked, thoroughly global  spaces.  You can go and hang out with  people from Nigeria.  So part of what we're trying to  look at is how are these spaces  in any way engendering this  willingness and ability to  navigate diversity in these  social networks.  Now, this is not some hold hand  sing Kumbaya song, right?  Thee are some serious social  ills in these worlds, the same  way there are serious social  ills in this world.  People do re-enact some of those  online.  But there's something happening  with youth culture, and their  ability to reconnect with one  another in informal ways and  leverage it toward political  action, toward you know, even  toward pranks, if you play  Second Life, if you're familiar  with those.  So that's part of what we're  looking at now. 

 And this other list of things  like science, things like  digital literacy.  You know, those are really  wonderful ends for say, K-12.  But in the big scheme of life,  those intellectual practices are  only as good as they can make  us, as far as our citizenship.  So the way I think about sort of  this notion of the cosmopolitan  that's happening online, and I  do mean pop to be a little like,  maybe it is just sort of  superficial in some ways,  version.  But these skills are tied up  toward learning how to navigate  this sort of diversity, learning  how to be a citizen in this  particular world.  That includes things like  understanding the structure of  social networks, and  understanding their dynamics,  things like how they're  collectively intelligent.  How to learn from one another,  of reciprocal apprenticeship.  Thinking about things like how  innovations spread.  And that's what we're after now.  I'm going to skip and not talk  about this at all. 

 There's one point I do want to  make.  This.  Final note.  Okay, to pull this back out to  more general life.  So it turns out that video games  are what they call push  technology.  So for those of you who play  video games, you know that like  HalfLife 2, all of us had to buy  a new computer.  And we did.  We went out and bought a new  computer to play a game.  We did.  Didn't even apologize, right?  Games are a push technology. 

 As games enter the home, they  pull with it all sorts of  technology.  So, the kids in the home want a  game, so you pull in X-Box 360  that actually has this massive  hard drive on it, that also  plays DVDs and stores copious  amounts of data.  So video games are this push  technology.  As they enter the home, then so  do home computers, for example.  Well, it turns out, what I'm  trying to point out here is that  I would honestly argue that  video games are not just a push  technology in terms of hardware.  They're also a push technology  in terms of social norms and  practices.  So what I think and hope is that  this sort of culture where being  able to build a model to solve a  problem in a game, being smart,  having a good solution that's  good for other people, is  valued.  And that that value becomes  something that's pushed out into  youth culture as well.  Final point, 'cause I'll end on  Will Wright, who's way smarter  than I am.  Will Wright is the designer of  the Sims. 

 Everyone familiar with the Sims?  The Sims is the most successful  game ever, period, like across  consoles and stuff.  Will Wright is probably, he's  easily the most important game  designer of our generation.  Will Wright had this great  statement in Wired a couple  years ago.  He said,  "The gamer's mindset...  the fact that they're learning  in a totally new way...  means they'll treat the world  as a place for creation,  not consumption."  And that that's the real impact  video games will have on our  future, on our culture.  So the point here is that while  everyone is worried about  violence and sexism, and issues  like that around video games,  and those are important issues.  We don't want to let go of that.  But part of what we need to  start talking about is how kids  and young adults are creating a  culture where you produce  knowledge.  You produce culture. 

 You produce video tutorials.  You produce on YouTube.  And you don't have to like it,  but the means of production are  no longer held in the hands of  just a few.  They're now cheap, and they're  in the hands of the everybody,  right?  And this kind of culture, where  that kind of generation is what  I think is coming.  Thank you.  (applause)