Interviews
Television Interview
Local CBS affiliate WYOU asked me to be on their WYOU interactive segment. Check out the interview on the topic of "The Value of Video Games" and the interesting calls.
Radio Interview
Read recap of discussion I had on News Radio WKOK on the topic of "Video Games are Good for Kids."
Newspaper Interview
The Danville News, a local paper did a front page story on Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning called Author: Games help children learn: New titles can be used to train adults for workforce
E-Learning Guru Interview
Here is an interview I did with Kevin Kruse founder of e-learninguru.com. We got together to discuss the book and the subject of transferring knowledge from the boomers to the gamers.
Kevin Kruse: You’ve been doing a lot of work lately in the area of boomers and gamers, what is that all about?
Karl Kapp: Yes, I’ve been interested in how the boomer generation and the generation known sometimes as neo-millennials, Gen Y, Gen Net, gamers and even as Generation @ are going to work together to transfer knowledge from one generation to another.
Kevin Kruse: Wow, that’s a lot of different names, what name do you use for that generation and what time span are you talking about?
Karl Kapp: I call them gamers because they have been deeply influenced by video games and hand held gaming gadgets. Just like the baby boomers were influenced by Rock and Roll and television, the gamers have grown up influenced by the Internet and video game. It doesn’t matter if a person is directly involved with playing games on a regular basis or not, he or she is still influenced by video games in the same way boomers didn’t all own TVs or go to Woodstock but were influenced by those events.
I divide gamers into four different groups. Gamer 1.0 to 4.0. The leading edge of the gamers are the Gamer 1.0 folks. This group actually overlaps with the end of the boomers. They were born in the 1960s and 1970s and entered their video game years when they were about 10 years old from 1970s to 1980s and they play very basic games. Really Pong is the biggest game for this group.
The next group is Gamer 2.0. They were born in the early 1970s to the early 1980s and played video games, again at about age 10. The games they played included Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Tetris.
Next are the Gamer 3.0 born in from the early 1980s to the 1990s. They started playing video games a little younger than the previous two types of gamers. We can use the time frame of 1991 to about 2000. They played games like Myst and Zelda.
Finally, the group that hasn’t yet hit the workforce but will have the biggest impact in terms of their use of games, gadgets and gizmos is the Gamer 4.0. These kids started using cell phones in the tween years and surfing the web at about the same time. They have also grown up on second generation consoles like the PlayStation 2. They play games like SimCity and the Sims, they participate in online multiplayer games like Runescape, Second Life and others. These are the real digital natives.
Kevin Kruse: Isn’t this just the typical generation gap? Any what about our generation, Generation X. What about them?
Karl Kapp: Good question. Actually, let me answer the second question first. Generation X is really a lot more like the boomers than we care to admit.
Generation X and the generations before learned to use the Internet and gadgets, but we didn’t have much technology at our finger tips in our formative years. I never typed on a computer until the 9th grade. The Gamer 3.0 and Gamer 4.0 folks have grown up in a world that has always had the Internet and online games.
In fact, in 1994 Time Magazine named the Internet the “Person of the Year.” If you were born in 1994 there have has always been cell phones, video game consoles and the Internet. You have never known anything else. I view 1994 as a milestone year in terms of the upcoming gamers. Kids born in 1994 are 13 this year. In a mere five years, they start to enter the workforce in service level positions and four years after that as management trainees and professionals in many organizations.
Generation X and the Boomers are what Marc Prensky calls “Digital Immigrants.” Sure we have learned to use the technology but we are always going to have some type of digital accent. The Gamer 3.0 and 4.0 kids are “Digital Natives.” This level of technology is all they have ever known.
Kevin Kruse: Did the fact that you have two young children at home influence you to study this area at all.
Karl Kapp: Definitely. I have two Gamer 4.0 boys who love to play video games, multitask and play with gadgets. I used them for inspiration, to try out some games and as contributors to my upcoming book on the topic.
Kevin Kruse: Contributors, what do you mean?
Karl Kapp: Well, throughout the book I have a number of experts and people from the field contribute little pieces so that the reader can gain perspectives other than just my own. I tried to get contributors from every Gamer type and from boomers and Generation Xers. So my oldest son contributed a small piece about his former favorite game Runescape. It is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play game that he enjoyed for over a year but he has since grown out of it.
My youngest son, contributed a picture of him playing a game on Sony’s EyeToy which is a camera that you hook up to a PlayStation and then the game interacts as you play. The best part of writing the book was collaborating with my sons, that was great.
Kevin Kruse: That is great and how nice you were able to incorporate them in your work. Can you tell us more about your upcoming book which, by the way, was a great read.
Karl Kapp: Thanks. The discussion of gamers and their attributes are the framework for the book but what I really tried to do throughout the work is to provide tools to the reader so he or she could intelligently deal with the knowledge transfer issue. I didn’t want to just point out problems, I wanted to provide solutions. So I looked to see what some innovative companies were doing and worked to develop some recommendations from those early initiatives.
Kevin Kruse: What kind of recommendations?
Karl Kapp: Let me give you an example, many people are making podcasts out of recordings of experts within their organization. They record George or George Ann and then make that presentation available to the gamers to listen to so they can learn new information. That is not a best practice. What they should do is ask George how he knows the difference between a machine running in spec and one that is not. When he tells you, “they sound different.” Then you need to record the differences in the sound and make THAT your podcast, not George telling you there is a sound difference. Use the power of sound in podcasts to foster learner, not just to record a lecture.
Kevin Kruse: So gadgets are a big part of the solutions that you are seeing implemented?
Karl Kapp: Yes, the use of gadgets among the gamers is huge. Let me give you some statistics. According to the Pew Internet Foundation, 84% of teenagers have at least one of the following a laptop or desktop computer, a cell phone or a PDA and 44% have two of these items. And, the kicker for me was when I read a statistic by the NPD group stating that 15% of all 2-5 year olds have a cell phone.
Kevin Kruse: Two to 5 year olds, who are they calling, can they even talk?
Karl Kapp: (laughs) I know, I thought I was up on this stuff until I read that. Talk about Digital Natives…more like—Digital Savages. Imagine what the learning requirements and methods are going to be for a person that started using a cell phone at age five. His or her idea of “connectedness” is going to be mind boggling.
Kevin Kruse: Yes, it will be, that is amazing. So can you give some examples of other practices that you have seen used to transfer knowledge?
Karl Kapp: One that I found particularly interesting was the increasing use of automation to replace education.
Kevin Kruse: Can you explain what you mean?
Karl Kapp: Sure. Probably the example most people are familiar with is when they walk into a fast food restaurant and they hand the clerk a $20 bill for their $7.89 meal. In my day, the clerk had to do the math in his or her head to make the correct change. Not any more, the clerk doesn’t make change, the cash register does. The clerk doesn’t need a class on “how to make change.” He or she just hits the button with the right picture on it and presto—change appears.
The same is being done in organizations. For example, several organizations have added scanners that instantly take a picture of a product, compare it to an ideal version of the product and reject ones that don’t match. Formerly someone had to manually do that type of inspection and they had to be trained to properly recognize defects. Not any more, automation replaced the need for education.
Kevin Kruse: In addition to providing those types of examples, don’t you also mention the use of cheat codes and how they can be beneficial to an organization? How can cheat codes be a good thing?
Karl Kapp: Well, you have to think about what cheat codes represent. A way of working around established rules. A way of circumventing requirements. To boomers, a cheat code is cheating but to a gamer, it is another option for solving a problem.
Kevin Kruse: But it’s cheating.
Karl Kapp: Not to the gamer. As my son would say, “Dad, if they wouldn’t have cheat codes if they didn’t want you to use them.” The codes are a way of solving a problem using a non-traditional approach. Traditionally, you work your way up from the bottom, not to the gamer. They believe that if you have knowledge in an area and can leverage that knowledge that you deserve to move ahead quickly. This concept, perhaps more than others, have gotten them in trouble with boomers.
Kevin Kruse: How so?
Karl Kapp: Well boomers are very hierarchical. The organizations that boomers created—organizations that were some of the most profitable of all time—were all top down command and control. Boomers are used to paying their dues and climbing the corporate ladder one rung at a time. You don’t make too many waves and you will get promoted.
Gamers, through technology have access to the highest levels of authority and aren’t afraid to send them an email telling them how unhappy they actually are with a situation or policy. Many boomer bosses claim to have an open door policy but then get offended when a gamers shows up with a problem. Gamers also are a little over confident at times and that doesn’t mix well with the circumvention of boomer hierarchies.
But, the genie is out of the bottle, organizations are going to have to change to accommodate the gamers, the boomers are leaving the workforce and are not going to be able to maintain the traditional command and control forever. Gamers want to be free agents and want to control their own career. They’ve seen boomer loyalty rewarded with layoffs. They’ve seen how ineffective “quality time” really is and how workaholics end up.
Gamers want to freelance, value quality of life and feel that they will be successful in whatever they do and they are not afraid to circumvent of work the system to obtain their goals.
Kevin Kruse: Can you give me an example?
Karl Kapp: Sure, let me give you one from a seminar we conducted one summer for middle school kids. We were teaching business concepts using the game Roller Coaster Tycoon which has a mini profit and loss statement, marketing campaign decisions and other business related elements. We told the students that for the first round, they had to have a high level of customer satisfaction as one of their corporate goals.
To achieve a high customer satisfaction rating, the majority of the guests needed to be happy. To make guests happy, the park has to have plenty of eating and restroom facilities, prices need to be reasonable and the rides need to be the right mix of excitement and relaxation.
While I was walking around the room looking at the achievements of the students, I noticed that one group had an extremely high park rating. I stayed for a while to watch their park and see how they had achieved success so quickly. The more closely I looked, the more puzzled I became. The park was extremely high priced, it had virtually no restaurants or restrooms and it had several dangerous rides. Yet the customer satisfaction rating was through the roof. I asked the students why they didn’t have any unhappy guests.
They replied that they did get unhappy guest but that whenever they located an unhappy guest, they would eliminate them. The student showed me how they did it. They would locate an unhappy guest, picked him up, moved him over a pond they had built and dropped him.
Kevin Kruse: They drowned unhappy guests?
Karl Kapp: Yes and when I asked them why, they said, “You’re allowed. The game doesn’t stop you. The middle school students had found that unhappy guests could be eliminated quickly by drowning them and that if you eliminate all the unhappy guests you can have a fairly high park rating regardless of park conditions. They weren’t really thinking about killing a person, they were thinking of how to get the highest satisfaction rate. It was a little disturbing to me but to them it was “part of the game.”
Kevin Kruse: That is a little disturbing.
Karl Kapp: Yes, it was and we quickly added the “No Drowning Guests” rule to our workshop after that. It might have been allowed in the game but after that it wasn’t allowed in the workshop. The point is boomers, Generation Xers, we probably wouldn’t have thought about drowning guests to increase customer satisfaction…you just don’t do that. For the gamers, however, it was something they could manipulate to win the game.
Kevin Kruse: So these gamers, are they hyper competitive. I mean are they interested in winning at all costs. Sounds like they might be.
Karl Kapp: Another good question, actually it is not as bad as it sounds. In fact, I would say that overall they are more cooperative than competitive. The competition that we see in many cases is competition against the game. The gamers working together to “beat the game.” I see gamers sharing cheat codes, techniques and strategies with each other. Groups of gamers form teams around a game and each person takes turn doing what he or she does best. This have become even more true with the advent of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play (MMORPGs) games that I mentioned earlier. To accomplish major goals in those games, you have to work with others or you will not be successful.
I always laugh when people say “video games are so bad for kids, they should really be out playing a sport like baseball to learn team work and cooperation.”
In baseball, the coach assigns you to a position, you hope the players on the other team strike out, you only play your “not so good kids” three innings and the only cooperation is when one kid throws the ball to another. Now both my boys play baseball and are pretty good but they also play video games which I think teach them traits that will serve them better when they enter the workforce.
Kevin Kruse: Really? How? What skills are they learning playing video games that they are not learning in baseball or other organized kids sports.
Karl Kapp: Let me answer by explaining how my boys play video games with each other and their friends. My older son invites over two or three friends and they begin to play a video game. If it is a single-player game they will negotiate with each other who is going to play first and for how long. “Until you get killed and then it’s my turn” or “until you get to the next level.” They will also provide constant advice and council to each other to help their fellow game players beat the level or avoid getting killed.
Inevitably, my younger son will wander in and want to be part of the game play. On a good day, the group will let him play and give him the controller at certain points in the game, where they know he can be successful. “Ok, you get this guy through the window and onto the roof and then give me back the controller.” Once he is successful he hands over the controller (usually with no fuss.) The entire exchange, negotiation, turn-taking and playing of the video game is worked out among the kids—no coach. During the game playing process, the players learn to delegate, take turns, rely on others for help and work together to achieve a common goal.
They are a self-directed team. No authority figure, the kids play to their strengths no matter how good or bad and the focus is on beating the game not their friends. The gamers determine who does what and how to solve the problem facing them. I think that is a work team I’d like to have.
Kevin Kruse: That does sound like a good team and speaking of teams, earlier you mention MMORPGs Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games. Do you think these types of environments are going to take off, I know that Second Life has received a lot of hype and that you occasionally blog on this topic.
Karl Kapp: Yes, Kevin, actually I am very interesting in what is going to happen in that area in terms of multiple learners. In fact, I coined a phrase to help describe what the phenomenon.
Kevin Kruse: Ok, what term did you coin?
Karl Kapp: The term I like to use is MMOLE.
Kevin Kruse: MMOLE?
Karl Kapp: MMOLE represents the concept of a Massively Multilearner Online Learning Environment. Others use terms like Virtual Learning Worlds (VLWs) and Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) but I think MMOLE is the term that best captures this environment. MMOLE conveys the idea of many learner all online at the same time working together in an environment designed specifically to foster learning. Also, since the appeal of this type of learning environment is mostly to the gamers, MMOLEs is the term that most closely resembles of their favorite genres of games, MMORPGs.
So a MMOLE is a three-dimensional online environment in which many learners come together and learn either formally or informally.
Kevin Kruse: What types of applications do you see for this type of environment?
Karl Kapp: Well one use I can see is to re-create dangerous environments in which learners can explore and move around safely. We spend our entire life learning in 3D in real life and I think we relate to 3D naturally so the learning is more effortless than it is in a two dimensional learning environments like traditional e-learning.
Kevin Kruse: Are there other applications?
Karl Kapp: Yes, I think another application is to immerse learners in places they could not otherwise visit like the inside of a human body to view how a pharmaceutical interacts with the body and blood stream. Or virtually visit a foreign country. The person could enter into a restaurant or catch a train or interact in some other way in the same manner they would in the physical world. It allows for practice in a safe environment.
Kevin Kruse: That is very interesting; unfortunately we are running out of time for our interview. I know you always ask the people you interview if they have any advice for graduates of your program who are entering the field, so…do you have any advice for graduates entering the field of instructional technology?
Karl Kapp: I think the best advice I can give is to stay active in the field and stay engaged with the changes. Learning and development professionals are facing interesting opportunities at every juncture. The field is re-examining our foundations of instructional design, new technology is being invented daily, large numbers of workers are nearing retirement and an entire new generation of gamers are hitting the workforce. I think there is an old proverb, “May you living in interesting times.” I have to say these are interesting times and anyone entering the field needs to leverage their education to stay current with the happenings within the field. You must constantly be willing to change and adapt. Flexibility is the one key ingredient that will make anyone is our field successful.
Kevin Kruse: Thanks Karl, the interview has been a lot of fun.
Karl Kapp: Kevin, thanks for the opportunity. It is always a pleasure speaking with you.
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