Week 2 reflections

From CTIN482

Re the Wii building surgical skills: What do computerized laparoscopic tests have to do with real skills anyway? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070219-8881.html

-- Jack

I recommend reading Cynthia and Jack's exchange on the IMD blog about this if you haven't already -- this class needs to take seriously questions about the relationship between things we do on computers or in game environments and how the skills we may learn can be applied in the real world. There will always be questions about the evaluative mechanisms for claims of direct transfer from one environment to another, but speaking as someone who has designed several evaluation rubrics for assessing student learning, I would argue that our ability to precisely control, know or predict our students' learning outcomes under all circumstances is far from an exact science. Sometimes a combination of intuition and anecdotal evidence seems as plausible as a carefully controlled and documented experiment. -- Steve