Google this!

In case you didn't know it, the University of Michigan is migrating its email and calendaring functions over to Google products, and in the bargain it is gaining a particular access to many of the Google apps some of us have grown to know and love: Docs, Sites, Blogger, Google+, and other things.

I've gotten myself involved in what it means to take advantage of these new things from the perspective of academic collaboration and teaching, and so I'm experimenting with some of the tools, with the (seemingly willing and definitely competent) participation of the students.

Here's an example. I wanted to involve the students in the creation of the rules of the game that governs us, and I wanted to do this in class. What better way of doing this than using a Google Doc word-processing document: you can have multiple contributors on it simultaneously, and you can display it to the whole class, too. Check out this quick video, shot on my phone and completely unedited (no Academy Awards this time!), but it shows how wonderfully thoughtfully students were able to work on a single document at the same time (while seeing it on the big screen in the classroom). In case it's not clear, there are thirty-two viewers on the document and about a dozen real-time contributors, all in the same room. Pretty cool, huh?

The Basics of Gaming

Today, my colleague Jim Morrow visited UC 256 to talk about the use of game theory in political science. This culminated what I think was a fabulous introduction to the course. Sure, we are three weeks into the semester, but the drop/add deadline is tomorrow, and we got the basics established brilliantly by it.

Consider: the first visitor in this visitor-heavy course was Stephen Garcia, from Psychology and Organizational Studies. His topic was the psychology of competition, and he offered us really interesting empirical results on what makes people want to compete with one another, and under what circumstances. Next we talked a little about the norms around competition, drawing from my own work in interstices of political theory and philosophy. How should we understand fairness? What is the relationship between effort and natural talent?

In the first case, with Prof. Garcia's visit, the academic evidence we encountered was experimental: The researchers had thought of interesting ways of tapping into any person's competitive intuitions, and they played around with those while having "experimental subjects" (volunteer or paid students for the most part) take tests, answer survey questions, and the like.

With the political theory stuff, we engaged in conceptual exploration of how to understand concepts such as "fairness" and "cheating." The backdrop of our brainstorming was the idea by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga that games are characterized by a "magic circle" that makes them different from reality: you step inside this circle, buddy, and the rules change. Do the rules fundamentally change in a game? What does it mean to cheat in a computer game? What is cheating? And, anyway, is cheating against the spirit of gaming, or fundamentally contradictory to it? You figure it out.

Today, my colleague Jim Morrow from political science talked about game theory. Where before we had tried to understand why or when we want to compete, and what it means to play a particular game consciously, game theory gave us a new handle: what about applying the idea that people are playing a game even when they don't think they aren't? That is, when we don't know why people do what they do, how about imagining them rational beings in a game, trying to figure out what the other side is doing? It turns out that approach can give us a cool handle on lots of things we don't have any data on. (When is the last time you remember someone telling you "Oh, yeah, here's exactly what we were thinking in the White House Situation Room" and the counterpart telling you also, "Yup, while in the cave in Tora Bora, we were thinking this"?)

[Update on January 25: Last night, Colbert Report invited the Most Famous Game Theorist in the World on the show, just in case the students weren't convinced game theory was hip and important.]

In other words, we have now gotten, in some important ways, the intellectual basics of trying to think about the games we play: What the heck does make was want to compete? What on earth does it mean to 'compete'? How might people think through the whole thing when they compete?

Stay tuned for more!

UC 256: 22 Ways of Thinking About the Games We Play

This semester, I am teaching a course that is both crazy and a lot of fun. It's not a political science course, but explicitly interdisciplinary course, listed under UM's "UC" division. (That means "university courses," not University of California.) It's a course developed as part of the "sophomore initiative," the purpose of which is to acknowledge that sophomores get the shortest end of the stick: freshmen get a lot of attention, and by the time you are a junior, you'll have chosen a major and found a home of some kind.

This particular course hopes to introduce the students to the wide variety of ways academia understands knowledge. It's called "22 Ways," and the idea is this: we pick a theme and then haul in fabulous teachers from around the university to talk about how their particular discipline addresses (or doesn't address) that discipline. We actually don't haul in those folks: we beg and plead and are incredibly grateful when they come. Because they don't have to.

The first time this course happened, in the fall of 2011, its theme was food, and the instructor my colleague Phil Deloria. My course's theme is "the games we play." Just think of the interdisciplinary possibilities! I wish I had gotten all the guests I invited, but the folks who are coming are fabulous. And I want to leave it up to the students to be imaginative and think beyond the approaches the course offers.

After all, part of what makes games fun is the ability of the player to determine what happens.

Why this blog?

George Orwell -- he of the Animal Farm and 1984 fame -- was a much better essayist than he was a novelist. He has a great essay called "Why I Write?" In the essay, he explains his reasons for writing. They are primarily political, and given it's Orwell, they are eloquent, thoughtful, controversial, and inspiring. Wanna know what he says? Read the essay. That's not what I'm writing about now.

In a moment of immodesty, I thought I'd name this blog "Why I Teach." But I'm actually not going to use the blog just to spell out my reasons for teaching in one or a series of posts. Instead, I'm going to use this blog to document the things that happen in my courses. The most simple answer to the title of this blog came from the Roman philosopher Seneca a while ago: Docendo discimus. By teaching we learn. For me, teaching is my most important form of learning.

So this blog is about what I learn.