EDUCAUSE | Games and Gaming

New ELI 7 Things... Brief Explores Wii

pkurkowski — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 13:26:51 -0500

The Wii is a video game system that uses a wireless controller capable of sensing position and motion, allowing users to interact with the game applications through physical movements. The controller has captured the interest of academic researchers and hackers, who have used the technology to create applications such as a collaborative choreography tool and an inexpensive, interactive whiteboard.

The 7 Things You Should Know About Wii, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI) latest brief in the monthly series, examines how Wii technology is used as an input device in virtual worlds and as a training tool that allows learners to perform physical tasks in a digital, risk-free environment.

Browse the complete 7 Things You Should Know About… monthly series.

E07 Podcast: An Interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & IT at The University of British Columbia

gbayne — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:21:27 -0600

In this 21 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Ulrich Rauch, Director of Arts Instructional Support & Information Technology at The University of British Columbia. He has recently been involved in a project called Ancient Spaces at UBC, which uses gaming and virtual world technology to recreate locations from antiquity. He also participated in a session at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference entitled, "Indigenous Cultures: From Observing to Experiencing, from Videography to 3D VR Immersion".

Ulrich Rauch organizes the implementation of educational technologies for instructors, students and staff in the Faculty of Arts at the University of British Columbia. As the director of a technical and an instructional support unit, and as trained sociologist, Ulrich combines his experience as an instructor with his perspective on learning technologies to research and apply e-learning strategies in support of collaborative learning.

A few new podcasts of interest ...

mpasiewicz — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:07:36 -0500

NPR's Andy Carvin recently joined Talk of the Nation to cover social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace. During the recording, they covered a number of issues related to their use in education.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993512

First Monday is starting up a new series of podcasts. The current recording features an interview with Ian Bogost about his new book, Persuasive Games. Next up is Siva Vaidhyanathan ... I was forwarded a preview of the very interesting recording, but they haven't linked it up yet.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/

Podcast: The Role of Play and Preparing for a Changing Student Population - An Interview with Rachel Smith

gbayne — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:23:38 -0500

In this 9 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Rachel Smith, Vice President of NMC Services for the New Media Consortium. The interview was recorded at the 2007 Seminars On Academic Computing Conference where Rachel Smith presented two session, "Games for Learning" and "The Role of Play and Preparing for a Changing Student Population".

Students are arriving on campus with a set of expectations and behaviors that differ from those of previous generations, including the faculty, who are faced with engaging them in the process of learning. Students' experience with new kinds of games and media has shaped their view of what learning is and how it occurs. This conversation will explore the changing way that young people approach playing, learning, and working and will examine how the concept of play can build bridges between traditional and emerging student populations.

Some Foundations for Second Life Pedagogy

HiredEd — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:47:30 -0500

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).

Being a design-minded individual, my attention was more captivated by the unique pedagogical opportunities and challenges posed by the Second Life medium. We were lucky enough to have Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins visit our campus to give a presentation on educational uses of Second Life. She described a lesson she designed on self-presentation and identity (or so I recall, I forget exactly how she herself positioned the lesson) where students had to choose bodies from a box or treasure-trunk, don them, and go out and interact in Second Life in those bodies. One group of students chose to go out as Kool-Aid men, and they went to a bar, where they bumped into people, angered them, got marginalized, tried to hide, sought solidarity with each other, and in general behaved like members of a visually conspicuous minority group. They returned to the home island a very short time after venturing out, having learned an enormous amount about size issues, discrimination and minority identities.

She also discussed programs like Global Kids in Teen Second Life, and related "Gaming for Good" projects, that put kids in the position of various kinds of decision makers - everything from authorities to commoners in famine zones or child soldiers (actually, she focused on the Darfur project, the other topics came up in my own web search - must apologize for some memory haze here...).

Reflecting on these instructional anecdotes, I find myself thinking that Second life is ideally suited for (at least) two kinds of learning activities - empathy-based learning and encounter learning.

Empathy-based learning design requires the instructional designer to create a habitus, consisting of physical markers and parameters, position markings, behavioural options and the like that enable someone undertaking the lesson to experience social or instrumental interactions in a way that allows them to experience reality from a perspective different from their own. Some offline examples of empathy-based learning include the blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment, having people who don't usually use wheelchairs use them for some significant stretch of time, having kids take care of a fresh, uncooked egg for several days to simulate the demands of parenting, having people dress as if they are destitute and homeless and have them try to carry out everyday social and commercial transactions, etc.

Second Life is a rich environment for empathy-provoking learning experiences of this sort. One might imagine "empathy islands" devoted to offering an empathic understanding of some issue or situation. A course on the history of the Klondike Gold Rush might be greatly enriched by challenging students to undertake the journey to Dawson in Second life on an island that replicated the physics and energetics of the journey.

On an activist front, rich and engaging empathy-islands for current social issues could be studded with "PSAs" or "ads" for social service/change organizations, which could be virtual "change boxes" to gather donations for those charities - thus generating a micro-billing stream of real support for the empathic focus of the island. Other calls to action could also be woven into the experiential rhetoric of the island.

Discussions about the educational use of Second Life should thus include some sustained reflection on the role and value of empathy-building activities in education more generally. It is likely that in many cases, a rationale for the use of empathy-based learning will further support a rationale for the use of Second Life as the environment for that learning activity. Others may already be talking about this, but as I enter this conversation about Second Life, I do so with this issue on my mind.

Another kind of educational activity that Second Life enables is encounter-based learning. Second Life allows one to transcend physical geography and bring diverse people together. A blindingly obvious way to leverage this for education is to bringtogether learners from different language groups together for foreign language practice. I haven't though as much about the possibilities here, but again, a sustained examination of the uses and roles of encounter-based learning in general will end up offering an important framework for constructing Second Life learning activities.

Sex, commerce and stalking do not strike me as the main challenges to building learning activities for college-aged adults in Second Life. As I said before, these things already characterize college campuses, and must be similarly managed in either domain.

For me the most interesting thing about Second Life is that it is a primarily spatial learning environment, which means that instructional designers lose the inherent contro lover instructional *sequence* that a primarily textual or audio-visual medium offers.

Second Life is inherently a random-access, exploratory environment. It even adds the degrees of freedom of flying and teleporting to an already free navigational paradigm of just walking around. Of course, instructional sequence could always be controlled by constructing a castle full of hallways to walk down, or a roller-coaster-ride through the lesson materials, etc. But in the absence of any such special construction, Second Life is non-sequential, random access and exploratory.

That offers a third "E" to this list of educational modes that are natural to Second Life:

- Empathic/Empathy-Based
- Encounter-Based
- Exploratory

The design of exploratory learning is an interesting challenge. How do you design non-sequential instruction? In a blog entry I wrote earlier, I discussed a game-design book that offers some guidance on this design task. The book is called _Rules of Play_ . In that book, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman describe three layers of design:

- Rules: The logic and organization of possibilities within the system of the game
- Play: The human experience of the system - the constaints that enable people to move through the logic of the game rules in a structured and workable manner
- Culture: The larger activities, social and instructional contexts engaged with and inhabited by the system.

Without going into too much detail about this (which I couldn't do even if I wanted to), it seems to me that instructional design in Second Life must attend to these three layers of design. There is the logic or structure of the experience one wants to create, then one must attend to how learners will explore or move through this experience, and the fit between this experience and other social and instructional aspects of the course needs to be clear (enough) as well.

While it's not as dramatic as sex, commerce and stalking, the combination of:

- Empathy
- Encounter
- Exploration
   * Rules (Logic, conceptual/factual structure)
   * Play (Learning activity, processing)
   * Culture

...does offer a foundation for some pretty rigorous work on the educational uses of the Second Life platform. It's not the whole story, but it's a great place to start.

Game Design as Instructional Design

HiredEd — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:09:17 -0500

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:

- Games as Rules (essential logic or structure of the option space)
- Games as Play (human experience and activity within the option space)
- Games as Culture (the larger social context supporting/supported by the game activity)

Salen and Zimmerman correctly point out that these schemas apply to any kind of design (p. 6). In instructional design, we can differentiate:

- Learning Content (the target knowledge or activity/skill space to master)
- Learning Processes (learner experience and activity options within the space)
- Learning Cultures (the larger social context supporting/supported by the learning program)

With this shift, it becomes possible to essentially read the entire text of _Rules of Play_ as a treatise on course design. I'll list two key insights about game design below. I'll transpose the first into instructional design language, and I'll leave the second unglossed so that you can translate it for yourself.

"The goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play." (p. 33)
>>The goal of successful instructional design is the creation of meaningful learning experiences.

"Meaningful play emerges from the interaction between players and the system of the game, as well as from the context in which the game is played." (p. 33)
>> ...

The three schemas for understanding games include a systematic schema (Rules), an interactivity schema (Play), and a contextual schema (Culture). There is a 'fractal' reproduction of these three layers within the "Rules" category, giving us three kinds of rules:

- Constitutive Rules (the rules that make up the game)
- Operational Rules (rules of play/interactivity)
- Implicit Rules (rules of etiquette, good sportsmanship etc.)

It seems to me that this three-level analysis is a superb frame for understanding course design. There needs to be a fit between the subject matter, the lesson design and the context these are being designed for. So if a course was well-designed to support constructivist exploratory learning , over a fuzzy and interpretive knowledge area, but the target audience was busy executive managers wanting to learn about something specific, then the course might fail because the Content and Processes don't fit the Culture. One might either change the Content and Process, or seed the cultural context by repositioning the course explicitly as an "executive roundtable", or something else that would better set expectations and help participants self-select in or out.

Alternatively, if the target body of knowledge is minutely structured and stable, exploratory learning might be counterproductive, forcing students to incur search and trial-and-error costs that are not actually necessary for success with this material. In Salen and Zimmerman's terms, the Process level would poorly "integrated" with the Content level. Straight factual opposition and rote learning might actually be the best way for students to approach that learning target (especially if the surrounding culture is supportive of rote learning).

Instead of figuring out "one right way" of teaching, it becomes a matter of "fitness" or integration between three levels of consideration.

_Rules of Play_ contains 600 pages of analysis on how to design the interplay between these levels in order to produce compelling, engaging, even additive structured social activities. Recommended reading for anyone in the instructional design field.

Constance Steinkuehler Presentation on Virtual Worlds

gbayne — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:39:44 -0500

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.

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.

Richard Van Eck Presentation on Digital Game-Based Learning

gbayne — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:56:38 -0500

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.

Two new Learnitology podcasts

cclark2 — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:12:53 -0600

The Learnitology Podcast is in its second year and there are two new programs. Episode 201 asks a "burning question," about blogs, summarizes an article on gaming, reviews a PhotoShop tutorial web site, and reports on news of clicker use. In Episode 202, there are reviews of two handy recording devices, an introduction into Yahoo! Pipes, and a review of a website for engineering education. We plan to release a third new episode around March 2. There are follow-up links at the accompanying blog.

ELI Immersive Learning Environments Focus Session--March 27-28, Raleigh

ecoghlan — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:50:56 -0600

How can immersive learning environments (ILEs)—virtual reality, games, simulations, and the like—be used to support teaching and learning? Find out at the ELI Spring Focus Session 2007, March 27–28 in Raleigh, North Carolina. The session will cover:

The effective pedagogical uses of ILEs and their impact on learner engagement
The interactive capabilities of ILEs that encourage the development of creative thinking and problem-solving skills through direct engagement
Implementation issues, such as design challenges, technical constraints, curriculum integration, and faculty development

View the program and speaker list.

NOTE: EVENT NOW SOLD OUT.