I have finally finished reading James Paul Gee's "What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy" where Gee gives an inspirational treatise on how the Education sector can look to the principles and methods employed by the games industry to get people playing their computer / video games and how the players learn, quite informally, a range of transferable skills and knowledge. Gee (2007, p. 215) reinforces his argument towards the end of the book:

"I have first wanted to argue that good video games build into their very designs good learning principles and that we should use these principles, with or without games, in schools, workplaces or other educational sites. "

This sentiment is shared by Malone (1980, p. 162) 20 years earlier who also felt that "these same ideas can be applied to other educational environments and life situations". The "learning principles" that Gee speaks of are his "36 Learning Principles" (2007, pp. 221-227) that he slowly develops throughout the book.

 

I can, however, see a number of time poor, resource hungry teachers struggle with some of Gee's suggestions, especially when they have to work with a rather prescriptive curriculum that changes ever-so-often according to the Government's latest "blue skies" thinking or knee-jerk reaction to some kind of educational or societal failure that needs a "policy plaster" to cover it up.

So, for the next few weeks, I would like to post some of my thoughts around some of the themes and issues that had caught my interest whilst reading Gee's book.

Watch this space...

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Malone, T.W. (1980) What Makes Things Fun to Learn? Heuristics for Designing Instructional Computer Games. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems table of contents. Palo Alto, California, United States.

Last week, I read a couple of fascinating papers from the early 1980s by Thomas Malone (formerly a research scientist at Xerox PARC, but now the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management) who put forward a "set of heuristics or guidelines for designers of instructional computer games" (Malone, 1980, p. 162) that were largely made up of three core elements:

1. challenge
   • goal
   • uncertain outcome
   • multiple level goals
   • hidden information
   • randomness
   • self-esteem
2. fantasy
   • intrinsic & extrinsic fantasy
   • affective aspects of fantasy
3. curiosity
   • sensory curiosity (e.g audio & visual effects)
   • cognitive curiosity
   • informative feedback

Greenfield would pick up and comment upon Malone's studies (1984, pp. 88-89) a few years later, whilst Gee's 36 Learning Principles (2007, pp. 221-227) wouldn't be a million miles away from Malone's initial ideas. Indeed, much of Malone's early work is echoed in much later works by other games and play theorists and commentators.

Malone goes on to highlight some potential gender differences (1982, p. 64) that game designers would ultimately need to think about if they were going to attract and exploit the potential female games market.

Whilst I suspect Malone wouldn't like to be labelled as a "futurologist", he makes a startling prophecy when he talks about the "different 'personalities' to different parts of a system" like the computer operating system, in short the Graphical User Interface (GUI) which was being pioneered by Xerox PARC at the time and was later adopted by Apple for their Macintosh devices. Malone (1980, p. 67) is quite emphatic when he says that:

"I think fantasies have two important aspects for designing user interfaces: emotions and metaphors." [emphasis are mine]

It has to be said that Malone makes some very astute observations as to the nature of games, games playing and what designers need to think about when developing computer / video games. Whilst the Malone papers are quite short, they do pack an immense number of ideas, suggestions and themes that, I suspect, have influenced the games industry for many years.

Interestingly, like Gee (2007, p. 215) after him, Malone (1980, p. 162) goes on to infer that:

"...these same ideas can be applied to other educational environments and life situations."

References

Gee, J.P. (2007). What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy (Revised and Updated Edition). New York, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Greenfield, P. M. (1984). Mind and Media: The effects of television, video games, and computers. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 

Malone, T.W. (1982). Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable User Interfaces: Lessons from Computer Games. Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems table of contents. Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States.

Malone, T.W. (1980) What Makes Things Fun to Learn? Heuristics for Designing Instructional Computer Games. Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems table of contents. Palo Alto, California, United States.

Acknowledgement

Savage, D. (2008). Game of Suspense. Savage Chickens. Available at: http://www.savagechickens.com/2008/11/game-of-suspense.html [Accessed 17 March 2009]

On their Web-site Game Based Learning (http://www.gamebasedlearning.org.uk/) James P. Gee and Elizabeth Hayes present a short paper on 'Public Pedagogy through Video Games: Design, Resources and Affinity Spaces' (http://www.gamebasedlearning.org.uk/content/view/59/) in which they exemplify and critique the notion that informal learning outside school compares rather favourably with formal learning within.
At the heart of this article is the concept of 'Affinity Space' where people with common interests meet and interact to further their passion. Interestingly these Affinity Spaces may be real or virtual and often are not within a school or University environment. In these informal spaces learning happens in the absence of clear rules, hierarchies or social preconceptions, just the opposite of the learner's experience derived from formal learning spaces.

For these spaces Gee and Hayes advocate the existence of a 'popular culture' which delivers as they call it 'public pedagogy', often in direct competition with the traditional school pedagogy.
As a case in point for this assertion they present the case of a young unassuming girl, Jade, who attends after-school activities aimed at encouraging girls to become more technology-interested.

As Jade was competent in playing the game 'The Sims' it occured to her that it would be nice if she could wear her real fashion clothes in this simulation game. As this was a task her tutors could not help her with they pointed her towards Photoshop with the intent to create and adapt digital images of her favourite clothing and then projecting them onto the avatars in Sims using appropriate game 'mods'.
And apparently in many hours of hard work she did mange to work out not only how to do this but also to showcase it to her fellow female students; she was also asked to train those who were keen to learn how to do it themselves.

Thereafter Jade learnt how to upload her clothes onto the Internet for more people to use them thus obtaining glowing feedback and boosting her normally low self-esteem in the process.
The next natural step for Jade was to replicate this approach for the Second Life platform with the difference that this time she could actually sell her products for Linden Dollars and ultimately make real money.

Whilst she was undertaking these tasks Jade spent a considerable time within certain Affinity Spaces talking to others and reading relevant sources material. In the process Jade did not only learn the specific technical skills within the context of this project but managed to acquire several important transferable skills such as problem-solving and (online) communication, information literacy and teaching skill, and  finally how to run a (virtual) business. And all this outside the formal learning space.

This obviously begs the question - are we over-teaching during formal contact hours and if yes how can we engage students to learn more informally outside reduced class time. Because there is always the temptation by some learners not to engage in the absence of controlled and supervised learning it will be the role and responsibility of the tutor to identify appropriate activities and affinity spaces tailored to the individual learner and their project.
This way the student may transform from a consumer to a 'prosumer' on the Web i.e. a person who generates and produces content of interest to the wider learning community.

Is this what is meant by Education 2.0?

I have been asked to find out what system other institutions use to work out staff deployment when teaching an online course - very much to my benefit as it will be me that is deployed!!!!

For example:

I deliver a blended learning course where there are 30 guided learning hours and 30 hours expected 'independent learning' (with tutorial provision if necessary).  60 hours overall per student.

We now wish to offer it as a totally online course  (with tutorial provision, to include at least one induction session and a two hour 'formal - externally marked assessment'). 

Presuming that the lecturer (me) will be 'on call' for different students over a longer period than 30 hours in total, how can a 'fair and reasonable' time allowance against which the lecturers deployment (or contact time) be calculated?

Can anybody out there offer any advice, examples etc?

Thanks

WendyJ :0)

 

I have been noticing common themes in the work of Mary Parker Follett (Schilling M 2000, Decades ahead of her time: advancing stakeholder theory through the ideas of Mary Parker Follett, Journal of Management History) and in collaborative learning / knowledge.

Both decentralise authority / power / decision-making away from a few key stakeholders. On a personal level, I like the levelling out, the sort of egalitarianism of all this. For learning, it provides opportunities for increased social learning in e-Learning, and can potentialy be used effectively in role-play.

One of the other activities that we have been undertaking has involved the idea of going on a treasure hunt in the Second Life environment. So far, Fiona Littleton has devised two such hunts and has given the players just a brief clue to get them on their way. These being:

1. High above the chapel walls lies the great work of Michelangelo.
2. In an Augustinian garden, play with these laws.

The first one was easy, the Sistine Chapel on Vassar Island. The second was a little harder as it required a little more research outside of Second Life before the treasure hunt could begin; but we would be eventually rewarded once we had worked out that it was Mendel's Garden on Genome Island.

These Second Life treasure hunts had a number of purposes, first of which was to give players the opportunity to become familiar with the Second Life environment; another one, was an opportunity to see the diverse nature of uses, constructs and artefacts within Second Life; finally, there is an opportunity to see how "treasure hunts" in Second Life could be used for creating a learning experience.

One of the of most potent themes to surface from this module is that people like games to have a degree of acceptable challenge-ness, i.e. it shouldn't be too easy and it shouldn't be too hard. The treasure hunt, like the WebQuest, is, for me, an intellectual pursuit to "unlock the puzzle" - it's not about being first or to receive the reward at the end; it is about the "challenge" itself and to succeed in that "challenge" to the best of my abilities - the "challenge" therefore becomes a personal quest to see how well I can perform.

UPDATE - 02.04.2009

The final clue from Fiona is:

1. Find the place where Viola and Sebastian live on

Week 5 of the course saw the teams being given an exercise that involved building a game around the Second Life platform. Team 2 member, Nicholas Palmer, once again, got the ball rolling by providing a useful mind map of the task at hand.

The game was based around the well-worn concept of role playing games (RPG), the format of this type of game is something that I am very familiar during my teenage years as I was an avid player (and sometimes author) of the "Call of Cthulhu" RPG system. Hamish Macleod offered a couple of examples that the teams could use or create something that was of interest to them. Hamish's examples included:

1. An Employment Exit Interview
2. Drama on Drug Action at the Synapse

The team members suggested some ideas that could make a potential RPG. One of my proposals involving a sales pitch by a young team of comedians for an idea of a comedy show to some hard-bitten TV executives was taken by Marie Leadbetter and developed further by basing it upon the BBC TV's "Dragons' Den" format. Marie was kind enough to create a wiki for the team to start fleshing out their ideas. The wiki was broken up into 6 sections:

• Game Description
• Rules
• Characters
• Scenarios
• Platform / Design
• Theory

One of the side-effects of developing this game was that for some of the team, the concept of "Dragons' Den" was not clear to them despite the presence of the rules and links to the BBC show and the Wikipedia article. This suggested to me that we were not using an universal cultural reference point on which to build and, as such, they felt they were not able to make a productive and fruitful contribution to the team project.

One of the issues here, is that teams need to turn around an idea into a fully-fledged "product" within a week. This means that the teams need to "virtually" meet with each other to get the ball rolling. Given that some of the team members are quite geographically and temporally displaced it does mean that they cannot always attend virtual meetings on Skype or Second Life. We can, of course, communicate via the Discussion Boards on WebCT, but again it could sometimes take up to a whole day before a reply is received. Therefore, in order to complete the project, some of the team members will have to "trailblaze" the project forward and having the other team members "piggy back" on when they are able to - this is clearly not an ideal situation as you want team members to have an equitable and democratic experience.

The Dragons' Lair RPG wiki can be accessed here...

Confusing about explanatory / exploratory... the idea mentioned in the previous post is actually more explanatory than exploratory; there is a definite potential hypothesis.

Over the last few week on the "Introduction to Digital Game-based Learning" module, we have been given numerous opportunities to look at an assortment of games with a view of developing an insight into how they might help with learning. Not only are we grappling with the nebulous concepts of "play", but also discovering how games could potentially help with the learning process.

One of the outcomes of the module is the opportunity to "play" and make our own connections and synergies between what we experience and that of the games and play literature. The course has offered a number of oppprtunities to play games, such as a treasure hunt in Second Life (I'll have something to say about that in a future post); creating and play games that make use of Google Earth; and developing a role playing game for Second Life (again, a future post will address this). This week is the turn of the WebQuest, which according to Dodge (1995) is:

"...an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."

I was first introduced to the concept of WebQuest in the "An Introduction to Digital Environments for Learning" module and got to experience one in the "Effective Course Design for e-Learning" module, where Stuart Easter developed a WebQuest as part of his Learning Event. Stuart's WebQuest went along the lines of finding a "single phrase" that linked the following "names / words / links":

• Circle Line Party
• Dan Hamill
• A link on Google Earth
• Jane's Addiction
• London Pillow Fight

A quick Wikipedia search, would have you discover that the answer is flash mob. Hamish Macleod began his WebQuest by asking us to "to discover what notion, or phenomenon, links (by inclusion or exclusion) the following words or phrases":

• Alice in Wonderland
• Artificial Intelligence
• A lonely girl
• the Bangalore World University
• viral marketing
• a denial
• Michael Douglas

However, the WebQuest wasn't going to be quite as simple as that as "the solution [was] not merely some potential linkage, but [a] specific linkage that [he had] in mind." which added a whole different complexity to the quest, which I personally relish - it's an intellectual pursuit and a battle of wits and minds that have kept the "little grey cells" of humankind engaged since time immemorial.

In many ways the Wiki Paths: The Great Link Race game works on a similar premise of the WebQuest and is part of a genre of games that involves "cracking codes" and "unlocking puzzles" that are in pursuit of "forbidden knowledge". The new Ron Howard film "Angels and Demons", a prequel to "The Da Vinci Code", is currently supported by an online game making use of Photosynth (which in itself is interesting as I will be using Photosynth for my final module assignment) which requires users to try and find clues and symbols to try and unlock the secrets of the Illuminati and shows how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to build engaging and compelling educational games (and not a single person was killed in making these games).

Note: The answer to Hamish's WebQuest is alternate reality game.

References

Dodge, B. (1995). Some thoughts about Webquests. [online]. Available at: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html [Accessed 6 March 2009].

During the wiki weeks I thought I would first take a look at the approach I was grappling most with - social critical and reading Shor's education is politics article - I found it very interesting due to the many parallels with this modules approach....

It seems our tutors are quite the libertines and problem posers! - and it all lies in the chat.......

here are the connections I could relate to:

' a Freirean pedagogy tries to develop a student centred dialogue'

Some values describing the 'Freirean pedagogy':

Participatory - learning process interactive and co-operative so that students do a lot of discussing and writing instead of listening to teacher talk

Situated - course material situated in student thought begining from their words and understanding of material

Critical - discussion encourages self reflection, how we know what we know, and quality of learning process -(why do we do what we do - what personal filters or biais or previous experience guides the way we are (holistically or at any one point in time), choices we make or how we act, react and interact - a lot of interpersonal, communication, rapport and building relatonship skills in the work place also covers this - for a commercial gain however rather than a socially driven libertine reason!)

Democratic - classroom discourse is mutually constructed between teacher and student - students have equal speaking rights in the dialog

Dialogic - basic format of class is dialog around problems posed by student and teacher. Teacher initiates process and guides it into deeper phases. Teacher invites students to take ownership of learning

Desocialisation - dialog desocialises students from passivity in classroom and challenges their learned authority-dependence and desocialises teacher from domineering teacher-talk socialised into - instead they are problem posers and dialogue leaders

.........

Affective - problem posing and dialogic method includes a range of emotions from humour to compassion to indignation - and we have seen many of these emotions already within our own discourse

Shor, I. (1993). Education is politics: Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. In Paulo Freire: a critical encounter. P. McLaren and P. Leonard (Eds.). (London, Routledge): pp. 25-35