Interaction and Engagement

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:

The Internet and a variety of emerging communication, visualization, and simulation technologies now make it possible to offer students authentic learning experiences ranging from experimentation to real-world problem solving. Explore authentic learning, what it is, how technology can support it, what makes it effective, and why it is important in Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, by Marilyn M. Lombardi, ELI scholar-in-residence and director of the RENCI Center and senior IT strategist at Duke University. This piece is part of the ELI white paper series.

In this podcast of “ Cyberinfrastructure-Enabled Learning Environments for Gen Z,” Gary R. Bertoline, distinguished professor of computer graphics and assistant dean at Purdue University, discusses the ways cyberinfrastructure is positioned to revolutionize learning as it has already revolutionized scientific research. He outlines how computation, visualization, storage, and high-speed networks can bring together the best of traditional pedagogy with new paradigms that reflect our times.

This podcast presents a panel discussion with four experts on immersive learning environments (ILEs), covering the operational aspects of implementing an ILE, including infrastructure, user support, and pedagogical and policy requirements. The panelists for this session, “The Bar May Not Be as High as You Expect: Considerations in Implementing an Immersive Learning Environment,” were:

In this podcast of the presentation " Cognition, Learning, and Literacy in Virtual Worlds," Constance Steinkuehler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses the intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in virtual worlds (for example, collaborative problem solving, informal scientific reasoning, computational literacy, and digital media literacy) and the way these coalesce into a form of cosmopolitanism found in the least likely of places, in context of pop culture.

Summary: Net Generation Students and Campus IT: Supporting Student Success in the Age of Multitasking, Facebooking, and Instant Messaging

The session was recorded for podcasting and will be available as a part of the conference proceedings.

General Session
Southeast Regional Conference
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Atlanta, Georgia

In this podcast of the presentation “ Virtual Learning Environments in 3D,” Phillip D. Long, associate director of MIT’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, looks at the evolution of online interaction from text-based collaboration such as wikis to 3D virtual worlds (VWs) such as Second Life. He discusses the potential of these immersive 3D VWs to serve as learning spaces and to become persistent new home campuses.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27–28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.

In this podcast of the presentation "Generation G and the 21st Century," Richard Van Eck, associate professor of instructional design and technology at the University of North Dakota, discusses the theory behind the effectiveness of games in teaching and learning; what the past can teach us about if, how, and when to implement digital game-based learning; and what this will mean for colleges and universities.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27-28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.