RhetoricVille

On Friday, I went to a small conference at UM-Flint on engaging students in on-line learning. The keynote speaker was Fred Goodman, a professor emeritus of Education from the Ann Arbor campus. He is a game maker, and his ideas for teaching revolve around games and the insights that playing — and especially designing — games can provide. He talked about several, and we played a few. One was a version of 20 Questions. The rules went like this. The moderator thinks of a famous person, and the players get to ask 20 yes-no questions to figure out who the person is. But the moderator gets to lie twice. After 10 questions, the moderator must tell the players whether or not he has lied and how many times. Now, a lie is defined as a deliberate false-hood, but as Goodman pointed out, you could have situations arise where the moderator might seem to lie but was not. For instance, consider if the famous person were Winston Churchill, and the question asked was, “Was the person a European?” Some people may consider Britain part of Europe, and others not.

The game becomes interesting educationally when you have groups asking the questions, and they have to agree on what questions to ask, how to phrase questions, and what the answers might mean. Also, the students could each play the role of moderator, and need to research a famous person’s life.

I could see using a game like this in various of my classes, which all focus on both critical thinking, collaboration, and writing. It would work well in an online class, too. I could set up groups with their own discussion boards, in which each group could discuss what question to ask, etc. Then in the main course discussion board, each group would pose its question, in turns. Perhaps each group (team) would have its own famous person to guess. But the learning would go on in their discussions and negotiations with each other, and then in an examination of my responses, which might be challenged (as in the case of the Churchill example).