Educating To Mobilize the Masses

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Educating to Mobilize the Masses David Williamson Shaffer (UW-Madison), Doug Nelson (Doorknocker Simulation/ Kinnection), Nelson Layag (CompassPoint Nonprofit Services)

How can organizations educate their masses for door-to-door canvassing, fundraising, or advocacy? Often the effective practices are well documented, but the novices -- who are often in the majority -- lack both the core civic skills and the confidence for independent experiential learning. We'll explore how games can scale up learning to build capacity for thousands of grassroots organizations.

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I missed a lot the first presenter's piece, but got the end here:

Ways of knowing and Ways of doing - reflection in action. Someone who takes action and reflect on it. The cycles get closer together until the thinking while doing happen at the same time. We can create a game based on these concepts and build epistemic games. Example - Urban Science -- example of game that teaches hwo to do urban planning. Creative solutions to complex problems.

They receive a directive from the mayor that a street needs to be redesign. The players conduct a site visit to understand the problem from the point of view of people who use the street everyday. Complex problem dealing with state street. They use a model where they can change the zoning based on the issues they learned about. They produce a model that shows the consequences of the proposed change.

We're interested in the results - transfer scenarios. We ask them to solve a problem with the lens of an urban planner. What should a fiction town do if they had too much garbage? They did before/after questions - what the kids suggested before they played the game and after. The answers after gave them more analysis.

Epistemic games - recreates ways of thinking.

The way the games are built - we study the epistemic framework. For example, we look at how community organizers are successful in what they do? The games let us think about the process of education of being a citizen in the world in a different way. Epistemic framework let us think about the world in a different way and think about education and think about preparing people for the type of activicism.

How Computer Games Help Children Learn? available for pre-order. His book.
http://epistemicgames.org

Doug Nelson and Nelson Layag -- a game on community organizing

Gave an overview of the program goals and the five different methods for community organizing. They focused on one outreach method - which was doorknocking. Is there a way to use a game to train residents to go door-to-door effectively. The intent was to get them to practice in a safe place. They also wanted the tool to be customizable to a particular type of campaign.

Audience exercise:

Asked us to think about a shameful experience in the last 3-5 years and get in touch with the that feeling.
Ask for a volunteer to share that moment with the entire group
One person volunteered.
That's what you get when you ask people to do a doorknocking campaign - the level of discomfort you felt before is why it is so hard to get people to volunteer.

Huge drop out rate. They don't learn the skills. Can we create a playful practice environment and help them understand.

Funders, Compasspoint, Subject Matter Expert, and Kinection Game Design.

The toolkit has three pieces:

Web site
Classroom curriculum - game intended to be used in the class for roleplaying exercise.
Game Simulation

- Identified the skills (8 skills) and created a cast of characters
- The game has a tutorial and exercise mode

Very simple game. Not Sim Doorknocker...

Goal: To make it freely available and distributing it via the web. Testing it with community organizations and get feedback on it.

Q&A:

Are there places where it is better to have live role plays versus the computer?

This is an 8 step process and there are no games for steps 4,5, and 6. Sometimes live role plays are better than the computer role playing. It is intended to be integrated with live training. If you are a community organizer and can't get a big name trainer to help you, you can take this and work with the material.

Can these games be provided in format that are more accessible than computer -- like cell phone?

Right using community technology centers for the location of the training. The development costs on computer is lower than cell phone. Then once we're ready to roll out on a larger scale, we'd look at cell phone.

What are some of things you think you could be doing better?

Reiterative process - build it. If it doesn't work, revise it. What do we have to do to recreate the ways that the skills are linked with values and knowledge.