Course Design

Sex, commerce and stalking.  In recent discussions on our campus on the use of Second Life as a learning environment, these were some of the first things people noted as concerns.  Sex was a problem just because it was there to contend with - whereas it is not much of a factor in our current LMS!  It was also thought that some of the economic arguments about Second Life being an "authentic" environment (because of the real economy) were questionable; i.e. what is so "authentic" about commerce, and is that the kind of "authenticity" we want to emphasize in our courses.  And stalking is a bad thing, of course...

I did not share these concerns about Second Life.  In ways I find both reassuring and depressing, sex, commerce and stalking are all part of life on campus anyway, and in these regards Second Life does not differ much from life on our offline, physical campus (except that real sex is better and real stalking is worse than Second Life sex/stalking).

Most discussions of games in education focus on their utility as course components.  Educators rarely take a step back to look at gaming as a design discipline.  Taken together, game design and instructional design might perhaps both be considered sub-fields of engagement design - the design of engaging structured experiences.  The scope of engagement design would include interface design, graphic design, maybe even advertising and merchandizing... theme park design...  and theoretically each of these fields could cross-pollinate the others.  But for now I'm just going to look at one classic work in game design that offers an interesting framework for instructional design.

In _Rules of Play_, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman introduce an analytical framework for thinking about game design that could be transposed to the instructional design field, supporting the creation of better courses revealing a new way of thinking about instructional design that could be used to make courses more engaging.  They suggest three cognitive schemas for understanding games:

In this 52-minute recording from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, we'll hear from Richard Baraniuk in a session entitled Connexions: Building Communities and Sharing Knowledge. Baraniuk will explain how Connexions, an open source software tookit, is helping authors collaborate and publish; instructors rapidly build and share custom courses; and students explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines

I've received a few emails from people in the Educause community requesting more information about the faculty development program that I offer at the University of Waterloo, called The E-Merging Learning Workshop. Accordingly, I'll provide (below) three links to resources that give more detail about our approach to faculty development vis-a-vis learning technologies.

First, the home page of the E-Merging Learning Workshop, which briefly explains its goals and approach: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/programs/ELW/

Second, a seven-minute screencast that explains what the goal of the E-Merging Learning Workshop is: http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/docs/ELW/ELW1.wmv (6 megs)

Third, a ten-minute screencast that explains how the goal of the E-Merging Learning Workshop is achieved:
http://lt3.uwaterloo.ca/docs/ELW/ELW2.wmv (5 megs)

These screencasts are in Windows Media format. I intend to also render them in Quicktime format, but haven't done so yet.