A virtuous circle?

June 22, 2010 — Daniel

Like me, you’ve probably got used to calls for educators to think more like game designers, to consider how good games help players learn how to play, from James Gee and many others over the past few years.

In this months Edge (UK gaming magazine, Issue 216, July 2010), video-game design consultant N’gai Croal resets a cosmic balance when he suggests that game designers think like teachers…

the primary goal of the developer should be not to punish the player … the developer should be invested not in the player’s failure but in the player’s success

and

developers could probably learn a lot from talking to teachers

Bringing Gee and N’Gai together then tells us that educators can learn from how the best games teach their players – and game designers can learn from how the best teachers teach their students. The circle is complete!

Posted in Education, Game Development, Games Based Learning, Learning. Tags: . No Comments »

OA Week 2010

April 29, 2010 — Daniel

Open Access Week has moved to Ning (funnily at the same time that lots of educators are considering ways to move out of Ning!). OA Week 2010 will run from October 18th to 24th – plenty of time to start planning and thinking about what you’ll do to support and promote Open Access…

Posted in Learning, Teaching. Tags: . No Comments »

On The Horizon – Free access week!

April 28, 2010 — Daniel

On the Horizon is the strategic planning resource for education professionals in the international post secondary and life-long learning arena. An environmental scanning journal, On the Horizon covers corporate universities, e-learning, private for-profit degree granting institutions as well as the traditional university. Areas include the business of education delivery, content and certification, as well as rules and regulations in areas such as institutions and intellectual property.

And for this week, as the featured journal of Emerald Press, online access to the journal is free – including full text of all articles. See the list of issues here [EDIT: Link broken as of 10am 29th April - hopefully a temp problem at Emerald - the journal page is here, but no access to contents until link fixed]. The 2009 issues are well worth a view – including special issues on virtual worlds, gaming and simulation, distributed learning environments and (an intriguing title!) Future consciousness in learning.

Remember – this is for one week only!

Posted in Education, Games Based Learning, Learning, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds. No Comments »

BBC study on Brain Training

April 21, 2010 — Daniel

The BBC will tomorrow broadcast a programme on a study they funded on ‘Brain Training’ type programs – and which has had its results published in Nature. The study found that:

While players got progressively better at the games, the gains were not transferable, Nature journal reports.

Players gained nothing in terms of general reasoning, memory, planning or visuospatial abilities, experts found.

But they say more work is needed to see if workouts for the mind can help keep the brain “fit” as it ages.

More on the program here.

Note that this is distinct and quite different from the Brain Training study that LTS ran in Scottish schools – which did find that math Brain Training games did help students learn math (published in BJET). There will be a number of reasons for the difference – the LTS study was using games which asked students to do exercises similar to normal arithmetic exercises – and math was still being taught in class. Perhaps successful transfer of learning is boosted when learning in a game is reinforced with learning in a second setting?

(Offhand, a lot of work on transfer of learning has shown that being able to apply problem solving skills in multiple domains requires learning in multiple domains – which is why some children can solve problems in math class but not solve similar problems in different settings, or vice versa).

Posted in Games Based Learning, Learning. Tags: . No Comments »

Free webinars on learning games

April 20, 2010 — Daniel

This Saturday, April 24th, The Future of Education has two free online webinars on learning games:

From Steve Hargadon / The Future of Education http://www.futureofeducation.com

Posted in Education, Games Based Learning, Learning, Teaching, Technology, Uncategorized. No Comments »

SLOODLE Moot 2010

April 8, 2010 — Daniel

From http://www.sloodle.org/blog/

SLOODLE Moot 2010 is approaching!

This weekend SLOODLE Moot – a free, online conference will be taking place in Second Life. A range of presentations, discussions and demonstrations will take place over the weekend including:

  • Devil Island Mystery. Learn how freshman students in S. Korea were stranded on a virtual island – and had to develop their English skills to survive – and solve the Devil Island Mystery!
  • Hacking SLOODLE tools. SLOODLE is open-source – in this sessions learn why you might want to change SLOODLE to suit your own ends – and how you can do so.
  • SLOODLE at the Open University. With around 250,000 online students, and individual courses with student numbers in the thousands, the OU faces some significant challenges in using virtual worlds to support its courses. Learn how the OU has been using SLOODLE to meet this challenge.
  • Cypris Chat demonstration. After a very successful set of demonstrations earlier this year, Mike McKay gives another demo of SLOODLE and the Awards system.
  • Saturday night social. Lights, music, dancing!

Get more details at the SLOODLE home page – http://www.sloodle.org/

( hashtag: #smoot )

Posted in Learning, Second Life, Sloodle, Technology, Virtual Worlds, conferences. Tags: . No Comments »

Researching Learning in Virtual Environments – ReLIVE book now out

March 4, 2010 — Daniel

Caught a little off guard with this, but the ReLIVE book (which I had a hand in helping edit) is now available online at SpringerLink here. The promo blurb:

Researching Learning in Virtual Worlds covers a range of research undertaken in 3D virtual environments, looking at both the methods and results of the studies.

This groundbreaking book is the first to specifically address research methods and related issues for education in virtual worlds. It opens with an accessible introduction to the book and to the subject, providing an ideal springboard for those who are new to research in this area. The subsequent ten chapters present work covering a range of research methodologies across a broad discipline base, making it essential reading for advanced undergraduate or postgraduate researchers working in education in virtual worlds, and engaging background material for researchers in similar and related disciplines.

Many of the chapters in this book are extended papers from Researching Learning in Virtual Environments (ReLIVE08), an international conference hosted by the Open University UK. Authors of the best papers and presentations from the conference were invited to contribute to Researching Learning in Virtual Worlds.

The book is actually a little cheaper at Amazon.co.uk – but no information yet on when the hardcopy will be available. But due before the end of the month. I enjoyed working on parts of this book – many thanksare  due to Anna Peachey who had the lions share of the work and did a sterling job, and to co-editors Julia Gillen and Sarah ‘Intellagirl’ Smith-Robbins.

Posted in Education, Learning, Second Life, Sloodle, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds. Tags: . No Comments »

Where next for virtual worlds?

January 29, 2010 — Daniel

On Monday I had the pleasure of presenting at the Eduserv ‘where next for virtual worlds’ workshop. Being asked to talk about the future gave me a nice opportunity to widely name-check a whole bunch of stuff and try and imagine how it might all tie into virtual worlds and learning environments a few years down the line. Since then it’s been full on marking and grading, just enough time to post this…

All of the presentations from the day are online at the Eduserv website. Most of these are in the form of embedded SlideShare presentations – though there is also a (slightly noisy) video of Ralph Schroeder’s presentation there. Hopefully other videos will follow. A wee note tho – if you are looking at John Kirriemuir’s presentation or my own, you’ll find a lot of extra supporting text and notes is only visible when viewing via the SlideShare website itself.

This is a bit of a problem with SlideShare embeds – it isn’t at all obvious when there is a lot of hidden extra content that you can only get via the SlideShare site itself.

(It also took me three attempts to get my slides to load up correctly without blank slides. And I’m not too sure why…)

As to the talks themselves… I enjoyed Ralph’s presentation – some good examples of the differences between high-end video conferencing, immersive virtual reality and virtual worlds and their strengths and weaknesses. His argument that there are two end states got a bit of a picking over on twitter afterwards.

Over on her blog, JISC’s Heather Williamson provides a summary of the day.

Posted in Augmented Reality, Communication, Education, Learning, Second Life, Sloodle, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds, conferences. Tags: , . No Comments »

Intl. Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments 1(1)

January 15, 2010 — Daniel

The launch issue of the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (of which I am an associate editor) is now available. Contents here.

A few papers relevant to games and learning. The late (and sadly missed) Leslie Jarmon’s article Homo Virtualis: Virtual Worlds, Learning, and an Ecology of Embodied Interaction. I’m not overly taken with the idea of the emergence of a new type of human (similar to my disquiet with many of the notions around Digital Natives), but
the paper does provide some good material on how immersion in Second Life affects many of its users – both in and out of the virtual world.

Michael Vallance, et al. have a paper which extends their ALT-C presentation on Designing Effective Spaces, Tasks and Metrics for Communication in Second Life Within the Context of Programming LEGO NXT Mindstorms™ Robots.While the students were working to programming robots inside Second Life, the focus of this paper is the communication between students. A number of factors supporting effective communication were identified, including such simple but effective points such as:

  • “Blend familiarity such as use of print-based materials”

A third article, from fwo of my UWS colleagues – Thomas Hainey and Thomas Connolly, is on Evaluating Games-Based Learning:

One of the main problems with games-based learning is that there is a distinct lack of empirical evidence supporting the approach. This paper will describe the evaluation of the requirements collection and analysis process using a newly developed framework for the evaluation of games-based learning and will focus on evaluation from a pedagogical perspective.

The other two papers in the issue will be of interest to a wider audience – in these Martin Weller and Niall Sclater (both of the Open University) consider The Centralisation Dilemma in Educational IT and eLearning in the Cloud respectively.

Subscription required for access to full text (or online purchase for individual articles) – though I note that there is a form to request a free sample issue. <SHAMELESS PROMOTION>And of course you can request the journal for your institutions library.</SHAMELESS PROMOTION>

Posted in Education, Games Based Learning, Learning, Second Life, Teaching, Technology, Virtual Worlds. Tags: . 4 Comments »

Computer Programming as Digital Literacy

December 22, 2009 — Daniel

If the so-called ‘Digital Natives’ don’t know how to program a computer, are they really digitally literate? In his blog, Tony Forster presents an “argument for the authoring of interactive or programmable multimedia as an important meta-literacy skill.”  It’s a good start to this particular discussion, I think.

Certainly, in traditional schooling literacy is not just about reading – it is also about authoring. With digital literacy, in writing blogs or posting videos to YouTube students are using digital technologies while authoring written or visual content. They are acting as consumers of digital technology while producing content. Full digital literacy requires the ability to create new interactive experiences – i.e. programming. This view is also presented by Mitch Resnick et. al. in their recent paper for CACM:

Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., et al. (2009). Scratch: programming for all. Commun. ACM, 52(11), 60-67. doi: 10.1145/1592761.1592779

Posted in Digital Natives, Game Development Based Learning, Learning, Net Generation, Technology. Tags: , . No Comments »
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