Homework on Mars

May 12, 2012 By 6 Comments

In the 20 years that I have been working with children, adolescents and their families, I have seen no end of grief caused by homework.  In fact, I sometimes wonder what families would do with all the time they saved if they weren’t doing homework, fighting about doing homework, looking for lost homework, trying to understand homework, or reading notes from teachers about incomplete homework.

And having worked in several school systems across communities of varying socioeconomic status, I can tell you that bad and boring homework knows no barrier of class or poverty.  I’ve seen my fair share of photocopied worksheets and looked at “problems 1,2, 4-8 on pages 125-129″ enough to empathize with my patients over the years.  Sometimes I manage to answer the question, how is this going to help me in life?”  But more often I’m of the opinion that I’d glaze over looking at some of the homework assignments too if I were them.

If you are someone who believes in the idea that we’ve always had homework, and that kids and young adults have just got to shut up and do it, don’t waste anymore time reading this post.  Because I think in general that homework is more over-prescribed than any psychiatric medication, and that it reinforces some pretty distorted views about education and work.  Unfortunately, they are also pretty prevalent views of education and work, but they definitely aren’t the only ones.

I’m not alone in my critique of homework.  Educator John T. Spencer wrote a great blog post about it a year ago, which points out that among other things, homework has been shown to not improve academic achievement and may even decrease it.  This research came from Cooper’s metaanalysis of over 180 studies of homework conducted between 1987 and 2006, and you can find it here.  Nor is this a recent critique:  As Gill and Schlossman point out in their work many learned and progressive people spent the earlier part of the 20th century trying to abolish homework.  Most of us parenting today however, were taught in such a way that we think of homework as a fundamental and inevitable “given” when it comes to school.

From the point of view of social emotional development and creativity at least, kids have a lot more important things to do when they aren’t in school.  Homework takes time away from developing peer relationships, engaging in extracurricular activities, and, well, being a kid.  And most assignments come in the form of worksheets and packets, which encourage dry research rather than lived experience or creativity.

I have a colleague whose son was given a list of “historic places” to research, which did not include one location in our Metro Boston area.  No Old North Church, no African Meetinghouse, no Lexington Battle Green, nothing.  No one place that encouraged parent/child time to take a trip or have a fun experience.  This is one way that schools inadvertently teach kids to “phone it in.”  And that’s not the only problematic habit homework instills:  If a child comes home from a day of work and does more work, that is being a good student; if an adult comes home from a day of work and works more we call them a workaholic.

The other thing about homework is that it inherently demeans teachers.  Although we are seeing some exciting developments with MITx, Udacity, the Khan Academy and other attempts to make education more scalable, we are being reminded that direct instruction by teachers is in many ways irreplaceable.  Even if homework reinforces what is done during the day, which it may or may not, it doesn’t replace it.

Worksheets in particular become just another metric for grading, and a metric that doesn’t say much about how varied in support and context each of the homes it is occurring in can be.  It can be argued that truly egalitarian public education happens in the school setting, as that is the one place that is a level playing field in terms of race and class.

But I don’t doubt that homework is not going away, if for nothing else than because it is “the way we do things.”  But given the wonderful new technologies out there, I don’t see any reason why it has to be so rote and dismal as it often is.  Originally I was going to write about using Netvibes as a virtual “Trapper Keeper” for homework, but then I began exploring and gardening on Mars.

Waking Mars is a game from Tiger Style, which I recently sampled for the iPad (it also is available for iPhone.)  You play the game as Liang, an astronaut who finds himself exploring subterranean caverns on Mars.  There he discovers various species of creatures called Zoa, who may be plants, animals, or something else entirely.  In order to solve the mysteries of the cavern, Liang must experiment and learn how to interact with the different Zoa.  This includes planting seeds, changing the pH of ground, helping mobile Zoa reproduce or herding them into predatory Zoa to create compost.  As one progresses, the player must gather data on each Zoa in terms of their reproduction, vulnerabilities, ideal environment and interactions in order to help replenish the biomass of each cavern.

I could envision a range of educational uses for this game.  It could be used to illustrate the concept of phyla and Linnaean taxonomy in general.  It demonstrates both symbiotic and autonomous relationships in biology.  It requires one to observe behavior and learn to predict it.  It shows how and why understanding the environment and life cycles of a biosystem may have applied value.  It requires problem-solving and critical thinking to advance, and the ability to compare and contrast types as well.

Waking Mars is an example of what could be begun in a connected classroom, and then continued at home.  Achievements are recorded and available for later assessment.  There is also social media capabilities to help kids collaborate on learning by tweeting things they’ve learned, and help teachers assess where the class as a whole is in terms of content.  Best of all it is fun, and more intrinsically rewarding than a worksheet.  I suspect parents would find it enjoyable too, and engage with their kids in a much more fun and playful way than the traditional role of parent as homework monitor.

These games are out there, and gamification is already being used in many educational settings.  And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.  What would you rather do, fill out a form or complete a quest?  Both require literacy and other skills, but the added benefit of playing video games and using social media is that it begins to let kids integrate learning about digital literacy as well.  One example of digital literacy that Howard Rheingold discusses is “crap detection,” where the individual doesn’t just Google something, but also questions whether the source is reputable, and fact checks it.  So to return to Waking Mars, an instructor could pose the question, “should we consider the game and its’ website factual evidence to support the hypothesis that Mars has caves?”  Why or why not?  And if not, what or where might we search online to get more valid information?

Sometimes we need to allow for the possibility that youth might know better than us about something.  If they are demonstrating that they want to spend time on iPads or computers, let’s ditch the pencils.  If they enjoy video games and technology, let’s throw away the weekly worksheets.  Do we want them to have the same disempowering and puritanical experience of education that many of us had?  Or do we want them to enjoy learning and become lifelong learners? It would be great if we could get rid of homework entirely, but if we insist on having it let’s make it fun and engaging.  Enough with the worksheets and problems 1,2, 4-8 on pages 125-129.  Let’s jet-pack through caverns and garden on Mars.

 

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Attention, Distraction & Creepers, Oh My!

May 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

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Digital Citizenship and the Forward Edge Transference

April 28, 2012 By 9 Comments

Recently I had an opportunity to visit a school for a daylong workshop, where I got to meet with the kids during the day, and their parents at night.  I love it when this happens because I can then ask the children what they struggle most about with their parents regarding technology.  So during the course of the morning I asked over 425 5th, 6th, and 7th graders what I should help their parent understand about technology.  I got lots of great answers from them all, and my favorite one came when one 7th grader raised his hand and said, “can you please explain to my parents that multiplayer video games have no save?”

There are several reasons why that request is actually brilliant, but the one I want to focus on is how this statement, and a person’s frustration at being asked to log off in the midst of a multiplayer video game may be a forward edge transference.

The term “forward edge transference” comes from Marian Elson’s work in self-psychology.  She has described the forward edge transference as being akin to what Kohut was talking with his interns about when he described leading edge transference.  Forward edge transferences, according to Tolpin, are tendrils of psychological growth in the patient, often hard to see, if not completely overlooked, by the therapist because they don’t look like growth.  Often we consider “psychological growth” as in the eye of the beholder, whether it be therapist, parent, teacher or someone else other than the patient.  One of the example’s Tolpin uses is that of a patient who cuts to be able to “feel,” and to bleed.  The forward edge transference there in Tolpin’s estimation, is the self’s still healthy yearning for kinship, to “bleed like everyone else.”

I use this example because it very powerfully demonstrates how even an easily pathologized concern such as cutting, could indicate a tendril of healthy growth, easily overlooked.  The behavior forward edge transference travels concealed within is glaringly “obvious” to us, and because of that forward edge transferences may be misunderstood, and the striving for psychological health get stymied.

So what does this have to do with Massively Multiplayer Online Games?

As I mention in my book MMOs are a form of social media, and collaborative play, where the player is often cooperating with a group of others in a raid or guild to achieve something that could not be accomplished individually.  Whether it be downing a dragon in World of Warcraft, unlocking guild achievements, or building a city overnight in Minecraft, the player is part of a larger group.  They matter to the larger group.

Embedded in the comment “multiplayer has no save” is the forward transference for a sense of kinship, and more specifically the dawning of a concept of being a digital citizen.  Here is an adolescent saying that they understand their behavior has an impact on others, that they want to collaborate online, and that they feel responsible to the larger group.  Saying in fact what all the adults around them have been trumpeting for over a decade of their lives in most cases.

A digital citizen is defined in Wikipedia as “a person utilizing information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.”  To be a digital citizen requires “extensive skills, knowledge, and access of using the internet through computers, mobile phones, and web-ready devices to interact…”  And the elements of digital citizenship per digitalcitizenship.net include:

  • Digital Access:full electronic participation in society.
  • Digital Commerce:electronic buying and selling of goods.
  • Digital Communication:  electronic exchange of information.
  • Digital Literacy:process of teaching and learning about technology and the use of technology.
  • Digital Etiquette: electronic standards of conduct or procedure.
  • Digital Law:electronic responsibility for actions and deeds
  • Digital Rights & Responsibilities: those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world.
  • Digital Health & Wellness:physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world.
  • Digital Security (self-protection):electronic precautions to guarantee safety.

Here’s the rub:  If you look at those elements, many of the adults charged with caring for and educating the young aren’t necessarily competent digital citizens themselves.  I can tell you for a fact that I have participated over the past decade with professionals and peers on listservs and bulletin boards, and have seen appalling standards for conduct and procedure.  It rivals anything I’ve seen adolescents do to each other.

We live in interesting times, when we are entrusted to educate youth about a technology when we often don’t know how to use socially and effectively ourselves.  We tell them not to interrupt, then answer our cell-phones in the middle of them telling us about their day.  We tell them to pay attention to us even as we’re checking our emails on the Blackberry.  We stalk them on Facebook to censor them in one browser window, and post embarrasing pictures and comments of them in another.  And we pull the plug on them while they’re playing an MMO even as we tell them that they’ve been inconsiderate of their younger sibling who wants a “turn.”

Part of the problem here is our neophyte digital citizenship.  People from older generations tend to think of video games as this:

when they’re actually more like this:

When was the last time you showed up at your daughter’s basketball game in the 3rd quarter and told her, “you’ve been on the court long enough, you’re coming home?”  And yet, we do this to kids online all the time, and foil their attempts to be team players and group contributors.

There’s a lot at stake here:  Multiplayer has no save.  10-30 people, often from all over the world have come together to try to overcome an obstacle.  When you pull the plug, you’re pulling it on all of them.  It is great that our kids know this and care about it!

Most of us have wanted to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to create something together, even if it is just one moment or memory with others.  We need to look at video games without the Pong Goggles, and see it as a form of society and an opportunity for digital citizenship.

To recognize the forward edge of a transference is never an easy thing.  It is small, fragile, the newest shoot of growth.  In a sense, all of us on this planet are in the midst of such a tendril of growth when it comes to technology.  But the time when digital literacy was optional has passed, and we need to do a better job with the next generation of digital citizens than we are doing.

 

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Optimism

April 21, 2012 By 11 Comments

This week I had the opportunity to meet with a group of college students who are on academic probation.  There were supposed to be over 20 in the class, and 10 showed up, 5 late.  One of the the things I was struck by initially was how subdued they were, and I suppose I can’t blame them.  The class they are in, on how to succeed in school, meets twice a week in different locations at the college, half the time in a basement computer lab even though they won’t be using the computers.  If they don’t pass this class they are out of the school altogether.  There was something discouraging about the whole setup.

When I asked them how many of them played video games, they all did.  Most of them had played their favorite game as recently as this past week.  And when I went through the room and asked each what they liked playing, I was taken by how for a moment their face would brighten and they’d smile, even make eye contact.  Probably the most memorable moment for me came after I shared with them the statistic that 80% of the time we play a video game we are failing at it, and asked them to think with me about why we can tolerate failure so much in video games yet have so little tolerance of failure in other parts of our lives such as school.  What was different with a video game?

One student, I’ll call him John, raised his hand and said, “I might win.”

What a sad commentary on what education can do to students who don’t fit a certain mold.  Somewhere along the line, John and thousands like him have lost a sense of optimism, a sense that they even have a chance to win at life.  And yet, throughout the one and a half hours I was with these students, every one of them participated, had really interesting comments, argued and engaged with me.  The last holdout was a guy in the back row.  I asked him what he had learned so far today about video games and our discussion.

He sunk a little into his seat, and said, “I’m drawing a blank.”

“Let’s take a minute,” I said, “and let’s assume optimism.  Because you can add something to this discussion.  I know you can.  What have you learned in here today?”

Long pause.

And then he said, “self confidence.”

I should add, and did say to the class then, that we hadn’t even brought up that key concept to academic success yet.  If he hadn’t have added it, we might not have ever gotten it into our discussion.  Each of them had unique ideas, worthwhile ideas, not all of which we agreed with, but ideas nonetheless.

It takes optimism to risk answering a question in class, start a business, go to therapy, or play a video game.  Without optimism we won’t risk trying and failing, and without trying and failing there can be no innovation.

Take a second and think about the world around us.  Is it perfect in every way, or would you like some things to change?  If you think it is perfect we’re done here.

But if you think that the world can be a better place, for people and all sentient beings, then you’re thinking something needs to change.  Maybe you think racism needs to change.  Maybe you think poverty and starvation needs to change.  Maybe you need to be a better parent or partner, or learn more about something in school.  Maybe you want a better job, or want to create a work of art.  Maybe you want to better understand what it all means and how to fit in?  Maybe you want your daughter to have a better life with more respect, maybe you want your son to have a better future.  Maybe you want a war, all war, to stop.

Nothing gets better without change, and risk of failure.  But to risk failure we need to think we can win.  To fail and try again we need to think we could win this time.  Optimism improves resilience and changes our body, according to dozens of studies done by Seligman and other positive psychologists.  And optimism can create a more conducive learning environment.

Optimism, in my opinion is not simple delusion, or a brain defect, as some would say.  Yes, we might fail, but let’s not let that get in the way of making an effort.  Yes there is a lot of suffering and injustice in the world.  We’d better get busy.

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Social Justice & Technology

April 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Every day technology makes life easier for millions of people, and in doing so makes life harder for others.

Adam Gopnik, in his New Yorker Article, “The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us,” breaks down the population into three groups:

call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.

Anyone who has read this blog or heard me speak would have me pegged as a Never-Better, and that is pretty close to the truth. I do think that we live in an era that rivals that of the printing press, with its subsequent explosion of literacy and education. In my lifetime I have already seen a startling collapse of time and space due to how the internet and other technologies have allowed us to traverse great geographical distances in seconds. From my home I can bank, buy, and sell. I provide therapy and consultation to people as close as my city and as far as Singapore with little to no noticeable difference. And when I want to relax I join colleagues and friends in a virtual world that has denizens from Australia, the UK, and Asia.

And yet, as much a Never-Better as I am, I have noticed how social justice continues to lag behind. Not in the technology, but in both the access to it and fit between human beings and the systems they are in. Technology, as always, has advanced beyond our ability to master it, think critically about it, and perhaps most importantly achieve equity with it.

Let me give you an example I have experienced fairly recently in how the technology that benefits me has put others in my own social sphere at a disadvantage. I have an iPhone App, courtesy of a nameless coffee vendor, that has allowed me to use my iPhone to pay for my daily coffee with the flash of a barcode. My local barista rings me up, scans my iPhone, and the transaction is finished. At first, as an early adopter, I was one of the few folks using this in the Cambridge area, but more and more people are taking advantage of this App, and it is now commonplace in Austin, TX and Silicon Valley.

The problem with this App is that is financially disadvantages the baristas. There is no functionality as of yet in the App to allow for adding a gratuity, and since technology has worked all too well in eliminating the need for paper currency, I rarely carry any money with me to add a gratuity. When I initially became aware of this, the temptation was to slink away from the register as quickly as possible, and if I didn’t have ongoing relationships with the baristas I might easily have done so. But instead I asked them if they had noticed a drop in gratuities since the App became prevalent, and they remarked that they had. So what has been a convenience for me has significantly reduced the regular income of others.

This may seem a privileged example, and a minor one, but that is in fact one reason that I am mentioning it. Every day, through these minute transactions, we are influencing the lives of others, often without thought. The trope of the machine replacing the worker is in fact an industrial one: Each day, a section of our population does basically the same work they did a decade ago, but technology has made it easier to overlook and underpay them. And for that to change, we need to notice the behavior, and then, I suggest, address the technology.

There is a shortfall between lived experience, social justice and technology occurring on a microscopic level in the US, and part of why we all need to become more digitally literate is so that we can advocate on behalf of under-served and marginalized populations for technology to improve their lives. Avoiding technology is not the answer. Slinking away from the register is not the answer. The answer, in part, is to contact the company in question and suggest adding features to the technology to bridge the gap. In this case, I’m contacting the nameless coffee company suggesting they add a feature in either the App-user interface or the register-barista interface to allow for the inclusion of a gratuity. Seems like a simple fix, but as someone who owns and works in a company that creates customizable features I can tell you that they are expensive, and therefore often not made until somebody requests them.

In terms of world equity and technology we have an even greater challenge, namely, access. More than 81% of people in the US have some form of broadband internet access, as compared to approximately 5% of the African continent. 1 out of 3 people in the US have internet speeds 10 Mbs, as opposed to 0 in Ghana, Venezuela, and Mongolia.

Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a game developed by Jane MacGonigal at SXSW, which she claims will have have boosted my resiliency and hence extended my life by 7-8 minutes after playing it just once. I believe her. Which makes me think it is all the more important that we find ways not only to create games where people in the developed world learn about developing countries; but help people in developing countries access and develop their own video games. With all of the great work being done in the US and Europe on socially serious games, and games for health, we are seeing how video games can increase resilience and learning skills. How can we use these technologies to bring about similar changes in less affluent countries and populations? Because if playing a video game could help us crack the eznymatic code of HIV, which 1.2 million people in the US live with, what about playing a video game to increase resilience in Subsaharan Africa, where 22.9 million people live with it?

I think it is also imperative that people in developing countries have access not only to playing video games, but creating them. If they don’t, then the same cultural colonialization that has happened in the past will repeat itself. We need to support social justice in such geeky and subtle ways as making sure that indigenous cultures all over the planet have the opportunity to design games that reflect their own cultures, not a globalized McVersion of it.

Between the whittling away of a worker’s salary in the US and Subsaharan HIV are a myriad other social justice concerns, but digital literacy and emerging technologies are the threads that bind them all together. The same internet that allowed LGBT people to find each other in a hostile 20th century can be used to out them against their will today. The same social media that allows a more participatory experience can give people new avenues and amplifications when they want to harass people. The problem is not technology, but our lack of digital literacy. And by “our” I mean the individual you and me. Because corporations and governments are making it their business to learn how to master technology and its power even while we debate whether it was Better-Never or Never-Better.

I’ve often said on this blog that if you want to run a private psychotherapy practice in the 21st century you cannot ignore technology. Now I’m upping the ante, and saying that if you want to be a socially just human being you cannot ignore it. We need to learn how emerging technologies work and how they don’t. We need to identify the slippages between human systems and the technologies that convenience some at the expense of others. We need to see the internet as an infrastructure necessary to make the developing world as viable as the developed. And we need to understand how digital literacy can empower us before someone takes that power away.

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Failing Better

April 7, 2012 By 2 Comments

 

Play is a vital part of being a person, and failure is a vital part of play. One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the connection between autonomy and failure. When children, adolescents and adults for that matter play video games, they fail a lot. In fact, according to Nicole Lazzaro, 80% of the time we are playing video games we are failing. What other activities in our daily lives can we say that about?

Education, on the other hand, at least the traditional model, grades us on a 100% model very differently. If you get 70% of a test or a class material “correct” you get to pass it. If you get 69% it needs to be done over again, or you don’t get any credit at all. This system actually flies in the face of what educators and therapists know about learning, that it is a matter of trial, error, course correction, trial, error, course correction… and so on.

This in some ways answers a question I have often wondered about: Why are we willing to be failing 80% of the time in video games, and so reluctant to risk failure in “real life” even a fraction of the time? One answer the percentages above point to is that education often stacks the deck against us, effectively rendering any mastery of content below 70% as a failure. This failure has attached to it, shame, sense of time wasted, futility, and hopelessness.

But there is another aspect of failing in video games that I think we need to pay attention to, and that is the role of autonomy. In a 2009 study, Jesper Juul found that people prefer to play games where they feel responsible for failing. The majority of those surveyed didn’t want to attribute it to bad luck, but something the did or didn’t do. They wanted a sense of autonomy in their game play, not luck. Conversely, they didn’t want to feel victimhood either, but rather optimism.

I have been playing a game on the iPad called Incoboto which has given me pause to reflect on fun failure. (An aside for gamers who have also played this and Dark Souls, have you considered Incoboto as a cutified version of Dark Souls, trying to link the fire and bring light to a darkened solitary world? Just saying..) The game has a series of puzzles which one needs to solve in order to collect star pieces to feed to the kawaii sun Helios following your character around. There have been a few places where I got “stuck,” and spent in my opinion too much time having to throw something exactly the right way. This highlighted for me the subjective experience I had for the majority of gameplay, that I was being challenged but would eventually be able to overcome the unneccessary obstacle. On those occasions I called getting stuck, I began to experience feelings of victimization and externalize responsibility. The game was not “being fair,” it was too hard, there was a “bug” in it making the ball not land “right.”

What helped me persevere was both compelling graphics and gameplay, but also a sense of faith in the game. Ok, sometimes I cheated too, by looking up spoilers on the game forum. In those moments, you could say that I was giving up the voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle of the game. But, and this is what’s important, I was also ceding my sense of autonomy. It’s a weird balancing act, in one case I didn’t look at the cheat to find the solution as much as to get reassurance that what I was trying was the solution. But even though I was exercising my digital literacy here, I was also giving up for the moment my sense of autonomy, and agency.

Failure, and tolerance of failure is a subject thing, which is why Lazzaro’s presentations illustrate zones, not points, of fiero, frustration, relief, and bored. Everyone has variations in how they experience emotions, and failure in video games. And if I didn’t keep that in mind, I might feel very disheartened when I read this review of Incoboto:

“Great mix of platformer and puzzle game, very smooth learning/difficulty curve, and quite a nice gameplay experience too”

Now I am not going to get into a discussion on norms and trends and the importance of betas, because my point here is to compare and contrast the experiences of failure in video games and education.

Education in our country is trying to overcome some serious design flaws of its own. Children and adolescents are given tremendous responsibility for their performance without a commensurate amount of autonomy. This creates a culture of victimhood. Rather than noticing they got more than half of something right, we flunk them. Rather than setting meaningful individual goals, we create industrialized curriculum. And if we do give someone an individualized set of goals in the form of an IEP, we label them as learning disabled first to justify it!

We need to improve the quality and experience of failure in schools. Because video games don’t occur in a separate reality from the point of view of our minds. That mind/body split of Descartes has been debunked for ages, and yet we’re still talking about “real” life. The reality is that mastering challenges and fun failure creates a feeling of optimism, which neurologically and emotionally improves our ability to learn in the future. If we think we are capable of solving a problem, we will keep at it. Therefore, we need to foster a sense of autonomy in learning. The minute we start talking about “my special needs child,” we are taking away their autonomy.

Am I saying we should expect everyone to perform the same at school or other work? Not at all, I am saying we should be better curators of children in learning environments, and let them have less stigma around failure. In a real sense, every child should have an individualized education plan, because we are moving (hopefully) out of an industrial model of education.

As a therapist and educator who has worked in and with school systems and parents for nearly two decades, I have struggled with this frequently, both within myself and with my patients. The language of diagnoses and learning disabilities is a language I speak all too well, and I have unintentionally colluded at times with parents and systems who use it as shorthand for, “my kid can’t ___.” Maybe if failure was more tolerable and fun in school we wouldn’t be so quick to adopt these identities, and maybe if we curated environments that allowed for more autonomy we would notice different varieties of success as well.

The other night I was on a Minecraft server I participate in, founded by educators and edutechs for their children. Several of the kids were on and chatting when I logged in, and shortly thereafter this huge flame war erupted. Capital sentences of “I HATE YOU” flew across the screen. Kids stormed out of the chat room, returned, then logged off again. Some of the young moderators were instigating further conflict, while others were earnestly trying to figure out why people’s feelings had been hurt in the first place. From the therapeutic point of view, they were failing miserably, exhibiting poor social skills, dysregulated affect, and poor impulse control. It took a herculean act of will not to jump in and actively curate this group and allow them to exercise their autonomy.

They kept at the chatting, and over the next several minutes they began to collaborate on understanding what had happened. This did not have the grown up version of a happy ending where the aggrieved parties apologized and made up, so much as the group told one party that they appreciated the apology and weren’t ready to accept it then (my translation) told a second party to stop instigating in the guise of defending someone, and encouraged the third to come and build something to take his/her mind off of it.

In my mind, the fact that this took place in a game environment where failure is destigmatized and autonomy is presumed made it easier for people to keep at the challenge until it had been resolved “enough.” There was no adult who was forcing them to stay on and work at this, they were voluntarily engaged. There were several halting starts and stops of chat. But social emotional learning was occurring.

This in my opinion is an example of “failing better,” and I think this is a skill that not only can be translated from video game experience, but desperately needs to. The more we except failure as an essential part of learning and work, the less stigmatizing it will be. The less we stigmatize failure, the more we encourage autonomy and optimism. Autonomy and optimism make you a better learner, a better collaborator, and a better worker. Personally I think the world could use a lot more of that.

Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.

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Worth a Thousand Words?: Infographics on Video Games

April 1, 2012 By 4 Comments

 For those of you who haven’t heard, Pinterest is a pinboard style of social media which emphasizes visuals.  Recently I was trying to learn more about it and how it might apply to the psychotherapy/psychology field.  So far I can see possibilities:

DBT- Using Pinterest to create worksheet boards, or better yet boards of images which provide self-soothing for distress tolerance.

Behavior Charts which are visual and available instantly from home instead of going home in a book bag and being forgotten.

Virtual Comic Books to help adolescents learn and practice sequencing and pragmatic speech.

Screenshots of video games that can be shared by gaming patients with gamer-affirmative therapists.

Psychoeducation Tools for a variety of issues, including the above example.  Click on the image to see my board on Infographics for video games and gaming.  They are not intended as professionally vetted research, and you’ll not the heading encourages viewers to check out the research.

There are obviously things to be concerned about, such as privacy and how best to bring Pinterest into the therapeutic session, office and process.  Pinterest is not HIPAA-compliant, for example, so would a link sent via hushmail be secure enough for some uses?  How might we make sure our patients could use this powerful visual tool in a way that did not disclose what health information described what they were using it for.

What do you think?  How might we use this powerful visual medium to enhance our treatment with patients in an best-practice way?

Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.

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The Ethics of Email Amongst Colleagues: A Manifesto

March 24, 2012 By 12 Comments

One of the big challenges we face as therapists in practices which require us to do some element of marketing, is our ambivalence about social media.  Readers of my last post will note the irony that this one will encourage us to be thoughtful about how we use social media to market.  But in my opinion, the question of whether one uses the internet and social media has been supplanted by the question of how.  Fundamentalist ethical stances tell us, I won’t ever do X, and it is easy to hold rigid stances like this when one doesn’t want to have to engage thoughtfully with things, like social media in this case.

But I’m assuming two things about you if you’re still with me.  First, that you are ready to move from a fundamentalist stance to one that requires more self-reflection and flexibility; and second, that you’re interested in my opinion on this.  That’s why I used the term Manifesto, with tongue firmly in cheek:  These are my opinions and my ethical stance on email, and you may or may not agree with them.  They allow me to sleep at night, but maybe they won’t do the same for you.  And I’m practicing radical transparency, so you can know how I work, and opt out of working with me that way.  But first, here are some underlying assertions for you to consider:

Economics of Popularity Vs. Economics of Intimacy

One of the challenges that email falls squarely in the middle of is dual and dueling ethics of popularity and intimacy.  The internet caters to both of these ethics to some extent, but the ethics of intimacy is not as easy a fit.  So the market pushes popularity more, and confuses the two some.  People want to have lots of “followers” on Twitter, “friends” on Facebook, and be “in” or encircled on Google+.  The value here, like popularity in general, is more emblematic than holistic.  And there IS a value to popularity, no matter what you were told by adults in high school.  We pay attention to how many followers a person has on social sites, how many +1s they get.  They become an approximation that hints at value.  Sometimes on the interwebs, an economics of popularity is all you have to go on without digging (and yes, you should be digging, but more on that later).  For better or for worse, this ethics of popularity is what gamification can become preoccupied with, with its leaderboards and badges if we aren’t careful.

The Ethics of intimacy is a lot different.  It presupposes time, relationship, and evaluation through experience.  Of the hundreds of people you network with, these are the 10 people you refer to regularly.

As therapists, we value intimacy.  As humans we are seduced by popularity.  As businesspeople we need to negotiate the two economies ethically.  Some of this includes looking at whether we are confusing the two, and where we get indignant.  Are you wanting to build an email list like a Twitter following?  Do you think that the two are absolutely distinct?  I suggest that the answer to both questions should be “No.”

People sometimes love it when they follow, or connect with people via social media, and are then horrified when they get an email from them.  They were hoping for a pure economy of popularity, one more hit or friend, not intimacy, with the vulnerability and responsibility it can entail.  But in growing one’s business, I think there is a delicate balance between the two.

I have a group on LinkedIn that I moderate and curate, which has over 1,000 members.  Some of you read this blog via that group.  People ask to join it regularly, and then dialogue, lurk, or meet others through it.  They often utilize it initially for the economics of popularity predominantly, passing over groups with 50 or 100 members because the 1,000 means something to them.

When they are added to the list, I send each person a connect invitation which says we have the group in common, and that is how I “know” them.  If they accept they are added to my network, and I only ask once.  If not, they enjoy the group and whatever it gives them.

I often translate these situations into embodied reality to inform my ethics.  When we meet at a group or professional engagement, you ask me for your business card, or I for yours.  We may say we forgot them, whether it is true or not, or we may exchange them.  But I have never had someone pull a card out of his wallet, than say to me, “I’m only giving you this if you promise never to use it to contact me, and I also want you to promise you will never give this contact information to anyone who might want to work with me.”

With the exchange of the business card, virtual or physical, we are moving beyond the ethics of popularity.  If you want to network with me as an individual on LinkedIn or with your business card, my expectation is that you are willing to be in contact with me in a more intimate (from a business perspective) way.  On some level I think we all understand something of this; it’s why we don’t friend patients on facebook or follow them on Twitter.

Once you are in my LinkedIn network personally, my Outlook program downloads your email info and then I upload it into my Constant Contact database.  This is intentional, as it helps keep patient emails separate from business ones.  I only use the Constant Contact list for emailing my monthly (at most) newsletter, and maybe a book announcement when one comes out or a survey.  All told, you should never get more than 2 pieces of email from me a month and very rarely that.

At the top of every email is the option for you to unsubscribe, and one of the reasons I love Constant Contact is that once you opt out, the program locks me out of emailing you via them ever again.  It helps me manage a largeish list in a way that makes sure if you want to be unbothered by my newsletter you’re all set.  I average a 26% open rate on my newsletter, and about 25 people opt out each one month.  I think this is a good thing.

I would never sell these email lists.  Ever.  But yes I might share it with a colleague.  I have offered to do this a total of once in the 5 years I have had it.  This is with Susan Giurleo.  I have known Susan for just shy of a quarter of a century (sorry Susan, the truth is out ;-) ) have followed and read her work and collaborated with her on projects.  She hasn’t accepted the email list as of yet, but if she does, you can opt out of it just as easily on her part, because she practices ethical marketing.  And if you have known me, shared friendship and trust with me, argued and collaborated with me about psychology, and demonstrated your work ethic with me for over 20 years, let me know, and I’ll consider sharing my list with you also.

 

Ethics of Form, Ethics of Content

So that is some of the process and my thinking behind it.  But there is another piece that gets overlooked a lot in discussions of ethics, email lists and marketing your practice.  We need to not just attend to an Ethics of Form, but an Ethics of Content as well.  In other words, don’t just look at how you are contacting people, but ask yourself what you are contacting them about.

To a degree this goes both ways.  People rarely complain when they get an email asking whether they are accepting new patients, but often get downright hostile when the email is not clearly serving their self-interest.  If that sounds like you, you need to look beneath or behind the Ethics of Form reaction and questions (“How did you get my email?”) to Ethics of Content ones (“What are you sending me?”)  It is wrong to send a bomb through the postal service even if you have the victim-to-be’s address and use proper postage.  Content matters, and has an Ethical dimension as well.

For those of us that are contacting people with newsletters, etc., we need to practice both forms of Ethics, in my opinion.  I never send a newsletter to my list which only broadcasts my book and services.  At least 2/3 of my newsletter contains articles and research I think may be of interest, or news and resources that folks can use.  Sometimes if a colleague is doing something new and interesting I pass that on as well.  I never sell advertisement space on my newsletter, and consider it the twelve times a year I approach my colleagues with content.  And of course I mention my work, because I’m in a business that I want people to know about.  I also ask people to keep me in mind for speaking engagements, and the last time I was explicit about this, I received three inquiries that day, two of which converted to speaking engagements.

So what I’m saying is to please consider both as a reader and a writer of emails, the Ethics of Content as well as Ethics of Form.  Do I get hundreds of emails I don’t find helpful?  Yes, and big deal!  I’m a big boy, I can sort through them, drag as it may be, as easily as my paper junk mail. And if I were to sift through them, the majority of the people who got my email address got it from something I wanted from them originally, whether it was access to a website or voicing a comment.  I’m far more concerned with Ethics of Content than Ethics of Form these days, and where I am really concerned about the latter is how Target knows you’re pregnant, not some poor psychotherapist trying to market their practice.

I am not responsible for your digital literacy.

Here’s my last and most provocative point.  My newsletter clearly has ways to unsubscribe at the get-go.  And you got on the list initially because you wanted something from me.  So it is your responsibility to take yourself off the newsletter if you don’t like it.  Digital literacy is something we all need to have in the 21st century, and knowing how to take yourself off of email lists, out of forums, and filter your inbox is part of what you need to do as part of your daily life online as well as offline.

You can try to stay fundamentalist about it, but then don’t expect to take advantage of the web either.  Don’t think you can post a blog comment, or subscribe yourself to free content, and then be surprised that people want to contact you back.  Don’t expect your outrageous indignation to carry you very far.  If you are saying, “How dare you email me?” be prepared to answer the question, “How dare you ask me to network or provide you with free content?”  If you were willing to get the freebies, be prepared to get an email now and then.  If you wanted to add one more “follower” to grow yourself, be prepared that we’re going to ask you for something in return.  Undying fealty went out with the Middle Ages.

Look, we all need to come up with some sort of ethical structure to navigate Web 2.0, and we also need to be considerate of others’ time and bandwidth when we contact them.  But we need to start understanding how we participate in this process by engaging in the Economies of Popularity and Intimacy.  We need to pay attention to both Ethics of Form and Content, our own as well as others.  And we need to accept that we are responsible for being lifelong learners of digital literacy.  Because, frankly, Target is the one you need to worry about.  I just told you how I operate, don’t think they are going to.

Agree? Disagree?  I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts?  And not just to get your email address.  >;-)

 

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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy

Thinking, and Just Thinking

March 20, 2012 By 5 Comments

Originally I was going to title this post, “How to Make A Million Dollars as a Therapist Without Ever Having to Talk About Money.”  And if I was just concerned about driving traffic to my blog and business, that would be the title.  Because there are a lot of our colleagues out there who  want to have a very successful business without having to deal with the sordid matter of coin.  I used to think this was the number one reason that psychotherapists have a hard time being successful as entrepreneurs.  I used to read, and agree with, several psychodynamic articles that have been written by colleagues which talk about how we feel shame around money, project our devaluation of ourselves by refusing to spend money on coaching or supervision, and have difficulty set fees and enforcing missed appointment charges with our patients because we feel that we don’t deserve to make money for our work.

I still think those are big hangups a lot of us have, but recently I’ve started to suspect that an even bigger one is our fuzzy thinking about thinking.

Therapists as a whole love to think.  We like thinking deeply about our patients.  Many of us love working with emergent adults in a large part because their neurology has finally blossomed and they are starting to reflect on their thinking.  We often enjoy studying and debating the thoughts of major theorists.  We even see the value of self-reflection in our work with patients.  We like to think about others, the thoughts of others, our thoughts about the thoughts of others, and what great thinkers have thought about the thoughts of others and our thoughts about them.  Boy, do we like to think about thinking.

Now I am no exception to this.  I see an immense value to thinking, in fact I schedule time during my daily work week where I walk around the Charles and think.  During this time I don’t take calls, I don’t check email, I don’t make appointments.  I think.  I intentionally schedule it during the day to remind myself that thinking has a critical place in my work, and has as much if not more value than a billable hour.  And I will often lament to colleagues in academic settings about the need for more critical thinking skills.  I’ve had colleagues critique my wanting more theory classes at BC by saying, “these students want classes that give them practical tools that they can use,” to which I respond, “how about thinking?  That seems like a pretty good tool to me, when did we stop considering it practical?”

So I am not intending to come across as anti-thinking here.  But I have noticed over the past several years who succeeds in getting their private practices off the ground and thriving, and who doesn’t.  And the ones who fail are usually the ones who come to consult with me, or then need to “think about it.”  I’m very concrete when I talk with consultees, and if they are in job crisis I call it that.  I’ve worked with people whose incomes have shrunk by halves over the past several years.  I tell them what has worked for me, and offer suggestions, and the suggestions require things like calling people to network or EAPs or insurance providers every day or write a business plan, or any number of other things.

They listen and say they’ll think about it.

Some people will make a lot of money off of those folks.  There are dozens of people out there who can tell you how to “visualize” your ideal client, “ideate” abundance, or give you a 5 point plan to success.  I’m not one of those people, and so sooner rather than later the conversation peeters out.  Because they have a hard time moving into doing something other than thinking and talking.  Maybe they’ll write a blog post or tweet a few times, but they get discouraged, because I’m not going to waste their time.  This isn’t therapy.  I’ll tell you what I think you ought to do.  You don’t have to do it, but I don’t have a second set of things I think you ought to succeed in your business.  So if you don’t want to do them, we really don’t have a lot more to talk about.

A lot of therapists, myself included, like to try to think and talk our way out of everything.  And many things can be significantly impacted by strategic thinking, and thoughtful process.  But eventually you have to do some other form of work if you want to be in private practice.  We have more autonomy as sole proprietors, but we also can’t just sit in an office hour after hour “just helping people.”  This is actually the fantasy I often hear expressed by colleagues, “I just want to help people,” as if the nobility of that entitles one to not have to exert any other effort.

One of my friends has a mentor who frequently says, “don’t confuse worry with effort.”  Much of the time I think we confuse worrying with deep thinking, and even more so with taking other forms of action.  We think if we worry about a problem either alone or with another that somehow that “counts” as having done something.  The idea of sustained effort truly alarms us.  I’m talking about me too here.  One of the reasons I have a set time in my week to think about things is so that I contain that urge to think fretfully and know that there is a time and a place for me to think about stuff.  And then I go on to other activities that are required of me during the day.

Another reason the Charles river is such an important place for me around this is that it is where I run.  During the week I walk along it and think, and on the weekends at least once I run along it.  But, and this is key, I don’t go to the Charles and think about running.

I can really only tell you what works for me, and incessant and indiscriminate thinking does not work for me, or my business.  If someone tells you that there is an easy, simple way to succeed in creating and growing your practice, I encourage you to be skeptical.  Creating and growing your business involves taking risks, trial and error, and most importantly sustained effort that is not entirely cerebral.  My experience has taught me that you won’t think your way into a successful practice, but you may succeed in thinking yourself into a bankrupt one.

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But Not Your Thoughts: Social Media & Children

March 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

 

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