Learn 4 Life

Gaming Education - How to create a culture of learning through designing real world games in education

July 28, 2010 on 11:37 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Foundation, Games based learning, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Learning Content, Learning Tools, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, mobile learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

Gaming Education

I have been looking at a lot at “Real World Gaming” and Education recently. This is a subject I have returned to again and again in the course of the last few years. Taking the idea of the culture “around” gaming I outlined in previous blogs, I thought I might explore the natural extension of those ideas into the classroom pulling together various sources and reflect on possible ways forward for teaching and learning.

Real World Gaming

In “real world” gaming the content of the game is contributed by the players, making it simply a set of tools enabling players to interact and compete with one another while on the go. Except it’s a bit more complex than that…

Recently a number of real world games linked to the geo-positions of users’ smart phones have become very popular; things like Flook, Gowalla, FourSquare rely on transparency of information about places and services.

Partly based on serendipity and partly on user input of information to gain points and badges - these “game” (verb not noun) “reality” giving users incentives to share and inform. Of course the trick is that all the heavy lifting is done by the game players who are crowdsourced and who, in effect, build the game resources for each other and, ultimately, the company running the game service. People come back to the game because it has a level of authenticity - it’s what they do in real life anyway as they go about their daily business. So it is turned into a game process whereby they receive awards and status.

Now why can’t we do that in education?

(update: One such app that was brought to my attention today is Mission:Explore and there is also GPS Mission )

Jesse Schell - gaming in education - Learning design and so much more

Look at the videos below by Jesse Schell - he talks specifically about education and how we might design a better way of doing things there with the ethos of gaming behind it - he pulls out specific qualities such as :

Beautiful
Customised
Shared
Real

and to that I would add

transparent
ongoing
iterative
rewarding

another presentation you might like to look at is:

http://e3.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

where he discusses the “psychological tricks” employed by gaming or virtual world companies to get users to engage and to return to the game again and again.

Learning Design

It was Drew Buddie who first pointed out Jesse Schell’s work at TeachMeet Milton Keynes last month:

http://blip.tv/file/3907169

Drew talks at length on the process of using “learning lenses” adapted from the ideas in Schell’s book.

Negotiated Learning - co-creation of your learning journey

I was also interested to come across Neil Hopkin’s video on Negotiated Learning which reminded me very much of the ideas on Co-Creation that were espoused by Steve Rubel coming from the commercial world back in the middle noughties. There are obvious parallels there for me. I tend to look around at the corporate world and see what innovation is taking place there and how that might have some corollary with education. Certainly quite a few blue chip companies now employ the process of co-creation and extend that into the workplace as well.

Certainly the co-creation of learning using school community is a start but now imagine this in your classroom, school, district overlaying that process as another educational “skin” or “patina”.

How can you “game” the classroom?

Base your learning activities and aquisition of knowledge on collaborative working and transparency of learning. Give points for those students who make transparent their ways of working and sharing their knowledge.

Make sure those “learning” especially, the more dependent learners, that may take some time to “get it” always level up.

Design levels of expertise - so students can Pay Forward to each other knowledge and skills modelled and facilitated at first by the teacher, and then given external inducements by way of points badges and levels for collaborative working.

Of course these ideas are not new to anyone who has been through, or seen a “traditional” education involving “houses” and “teams” will recognise certain common elements as will anyone who have been through the scouting movement. But that’s where the comparison ends…

The difference here could be that the elements of teaching students to teach each other to learn through peer instruction and review could itself be gamed.

It’s not something imposed and mediated from on high but built into the very fabric of the way people could run their classes giving rewards for both the teachers and learners involved but levelling them according to - off the top of my head :

knowledge

expertise

competency

design

application

engagement

reflection

peer review

In effect, through a social gaming mechanism you build a ‘culture of learning’ that allows pupils to collaborate or to self-study in certain instances given enough initial scaffolding and modelling by the faciltator.

Not only would you use a process of learning lenses to design activities as outlined by Drew above - seredipitous triggers to get yourself to reflect in your planning but also you get the students to iterate and reflect on their learning by extrinsic rewards built into the system when they have achieved certain goals. Building in opportunities to both capture the process and use the documentation of the process as a resource would be an ideal use for ICT.

In that way you can build up a portfolio of work and a set of exemplar material to use for revision, starters, explication, modelling. The list is endless. How would you do it?

Game On?

All you need to create your own outside broadcast unit and stream video from almost anywhere

July 8, 2010 on 12:32 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Learning Tools, Web 2.0, advisory, informal learning, mobile, mobile learning, podcasting, teachmeet, video, video streaming | 0 Comments

I made this presentation for TeachMeet Milton Keynes last night #TMMK but didn’t present as I thought the practitioners who turned up more worthy that evening and time was short.

So many people have asked me how I did the broadcast from the Treehouse last year http://www.l4l.co.uk/?p=690 I thought I’d show what kit was needed and how much it cost.

So download the film, go and buy the kit and write the AUPs and agree the policies with your communities and off you go…

Interview with James Maloney about TeachMeet Blackpool

June 17, 2010 on 11:51 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Innovation, Personalised Learning, Web 2.0, informal learning, teachmeet | 0 Comments

James, (mister_jIm on Twitter), together with Tom Sale (TomSale on Twitter) asked me to come up to Blackpool and stream and film the second TeachMeet they had organised for the area. The whole event was opened by Professor Stephen Heppell. It was extremely successful with over 150 practising teachers attending- you can see pictures of the event here.

I also took the opportunity to interview James before leaving next morning. Here is a brief interview I did with him about blogs and TeachMeets.

The culture around gaming

June 2, 2010 on 10:29 am | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Games based learning, Innovation, advisory, conferences, informal learning | 0 Comments

At the recent MirandaMod at the Games Based Learning Conference I gave a brief “provocative” presentation about the culture behind Games Based Learning and how schools can use that culture of activity to make learning more productive.

The YouTube Version is visible here for other devices:

My Prezi presentation here if you want to follow along:

Here is the audio podcast of the session too >>>> Audio file .

Why are we still arguing over Gaming in Education?

March 3, 2010 on 9:14 pm | In Continual Professional Development, Curriculum, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Games based learning, Handheld Learning, Innovation, Learning Content, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, distributed networking, informal learning, pedagogy | 0 Comments

When I was little (between 5 and 10 years old) I grew up in the early-sixties, post second world war era London of bombsites and grey realities.

Like most boys my age at that time, I watched an endless succession of Brits Vs Germans war films at the saturday cinema club, on (the newly acquired) TV and bought things like the Commando Comic - which was every bit as gruesome as anything you’ll find today in Call of Duty :

I used to have endless cap gun fights with my friends in the streets. I used to take the bus to Southend so I could walk down to the pier and play a very early version of an electronic video game involving a real periscope and a U-Boat on screen. I used to spend hours and all my pocket money on that infernal machine torpedoing things from freighters to enemy gunboats. I can’t say it scarred me for life or affected my cognitive development - it was all pretend and excellent fun.

REALITY vs FANTASY

I haven’t forgotten the thrill it gave me as a child but I wasn’t naive enough to think that all I consumed was anything other than fantasy. The realities of the Vietnam war and other adult intrusions into my life were more than evident and I can still remember the bowel freezing moments of sirens on police stations being tested in London leading up to the nuclear confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So when I read about the supposed dangers of gaming and the numerous negative references to their application to education I remember my own history in this area with a wry smile. When the ZX Spectrum came out twenty years later I bought one immediately and played a fair few of the games at the time. By that time I was teaching and I started to learn Basic and brought the machine into class so I could program animations for pupils and start to teach them how to code.

Five years ago, when Second Life came out, I was an early adopter - I’m still in there working out smart ways of using the immersive environment to teach and learn effectively. Anyone who knows me, knows I am not really into reminiscence or nostalgia for times gone by - I prefer to live in the present but where relevant, the past can give an insight or long view into events going on today so long as we learn from our mistakes…

BACKLASH AGAINST GAMING AND MORAL PANICS

The sudden backlash against online Gaming and the arising of concerns about possible changes in brain activity in Teens and  “unethical” lack of responsibility makes me wonder. And I had, to be honest, one of those WTF moments (if you don’t know what that means cover your synapses I won’t provide you with a link).

You see they are only pretend - ask any teenager if they consider the war games they play to be real…The whole process bound up in gaming is, strangely, a ludic one - this may be news to some people-  it doesn’t have to have real life repercussions. Just as the imaginary number of people I shot dead when a child never turned me into a rampaging serial killer - it isn’t real. But then nobody was giving me brain scans at the time - it’s probably too late now…

ONLINE GAMING HAS A LONG HISTORY

More than 30 years ago, in 1978, before the personal computer got going in homes - people like Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw adapted interactive book text adventures and Dragon and Dungeon board games to make the first MUD at Essex university .

That’s 32 years ago and it has spawned a grand tradition of variants - but no cognitive casualties or people bereft of ethical sensibilities I can see despite its long history. Only recently have we got the long tail of moral panic beginning to emerge on this.

WHY TEENS LIKE TO SUBVERT GAMES?

Now you may consider me a bad father but I let my son play Grand Theft Auto. Shock horror you may think but rewind a little and consider this. He’s almost always playing it in front of me - his maturational age in some senses is way beyond his chronological age - I monitor his gameplay and I’ve never seen him do anything other than subvert the game with his mates online. Today’s teenagers are extremely sophisticated and are aware of the nuances, the genres and the possibilities of such games - they pick up on stuff older people might well miss - here he is talking to me about what he finds intriguing about the “Game”.

Link to interview

What seems to cause the most outrage in using Games for Learning is the “content” - which I agree can be quite dubious in some cases - but most of the kids I have observed in his agegroup (mid teens) seem more intent on working together to subvert or solve problems rather than worry unduly about the ethical repercussions of the roles they are taking within gameplay. Remember it’s make believe. That’s not to say that some games are entirely inappropriate for various agegroups but used with discretion, insight and understanding the elements and social activity “around” gameplay are a powerful motivational force in learning.

CARTOON VIOLENCE AND ETHICAL CONCERNS

One of the very first disturbing things (to me) that  I came across when I first encountered the web was a site called: “Kill Barney“.

Doing a bit of ad hoc informal research I was interviewing pupils at my school back in 1994 - a few of them liked to spend some time at home (those few with internet connections) playing online games and I was interested in finding out what was popular. Amongst the 10 and 11 year olds at the time regardless of gender - KIll Barney was among the top three. The site consisted of an early Flash or Javascript animation whereby you could stab, shoot and otherwise mutilate (in cartoon form) Barney the Dinosaur.  At first I was shocked but my pupils regarded it as something to be dismissed as completely devoid of the ethical baggage I had invested in it. They reassured me it was only a cartoon character and that what they were doing wasn’t related to real life in any way. It was a disapprobation of the saccharine like nature of the character - they saw it for what it was - poking fun (although in an extreme way) at the preprocessed cartoon character they had grown out of. I hadn’t observed any perceptible change in their playground or other behaviours to give me concern at the time. Sometimes a game is just a game no matter how you dress it up.

Now compare this to the use of “drones” controlled by non-military staff through consoles 2,000 - 5,000 miles away from the “target” kill. These are being controlled in the home-counties by non-combatants who can drive home to their families at night without the slightest concern. Without wishing to get overly political on this point I know this causes extreme ethical discomfort in me- this is “real killing” where serious games and the death of individuals at the other end are part of a continuum - not just some scary “story”. “That” is the difference between real life and made up I would think and worth reflecting on in this context. This is happening right now in our country and I would consider that far more noteworthy than moral panics about “horror tales” corrupting our youth. Sometimes you have to “get real”.

PROCESS vs CONTENT

Which brings me to the present and the efforts of nay-sayers to belittle the positive effects of gaming. I have observed gaming for over 20 years both in my family (my sister is an avid gamer and has been for two decades) and in my professional life. It seems to me what people always go for is the content and never the process behind what is involved in gaming. With the advent of social media around gaming - online activity and reflection there seems to be an added element of communites of practice that could be harnessed for educational purposes.

In the nineties I was involved with the trialling of “Toon Talk” - part of a research project by the Institute of Education investigating the designing and playing of games. This was fascinating because it used a video game to teach the elements of programming and maths and is still an excellent resource - it can be downloaded free here for Windows. What was missing then was a process to quickly share, through social media, the results of game play and exemplars with a wider audience.

SOCIAL ACTIVITY AROUND GAMING

What has radically changed gaming, at present, is the social activity “around” these games and particularly the synchronous online elements of communication now built into the more powerful boxes. People are able to share activity and insight in a way they were never able to do before. Most “gamers” are a subset of people who know how to coalesce around content and build ad hoc communities of practice to enable rapid learning or modelling of skillsets - it’s all pretty “meta” activity around the actual game and perhaps our focus should be on the processes behind that activity. We could learn things from this activity.

So what are the elements of this social activity - well here are a few I’ve observed:

• Ad hoc communities of practice
• Use of Forums to debate technique
• Transparent Sharing of Skillsets
• Willingness to create learning exemplars using new media especially online video
• Subversion and repurposing of content underpinned by humour
• Highly dynamic learning is going on
  

Gamers seem to come together and coalesce around games and the skillsets involved in playing online games - they appear to have quite a good fluency with ICT skills in general and always seem quite willing to show off their prowess or provide online tutorials or “walkthroughs” of game elements whether this is a “cheat” a “glitch” or a other techniques in the games.

If gamers want to “cheat” or learn to navigate through a game (which can be a highly complex set of skills) - what do they do?

Well they discuss what they do on forums - they make transparent what and how they do things - they make walkthroughs for games for other gamers - they tap into a community of practice. They work together to evolve a little ecosystem of learning by making films, screenshots and putting them up on sites like YouTube and these help others learn those skillsets. These often involve “in-jokes” around gaming culture.

Now if a similar culture were developed in teaching where pupils are encouraged to share and build pathways of learning for others wouldn’t that be a good thing? As a teacher I had many abilities in my class - some kids needed a context for learning for it to make sense for them others could abstract knowledge almost seamlessly - if I had access to tools like Screenr and other film making resources I could have made them little interactive primers to repeat again and again if they were finding it hard. When teaching in Second Life I encourage adult learners to make a record of their sessions using these tools so they can share them with others.

HOW SOME EDUCATORS ARE EXPLOITING GAMES FOR LEARNING USING “REAL LIFE” SOCIAL COMMUNITY CONTEXTS

So far in this blog I have underpinned the fact that most games are make believe, pretend - not real - er that’s why they are “games”.

However if you are going to introduce Gaming into an institutional context without killing the enjoyment of them stone dead and exploiting the best elements of gaming for educational purposes - how do you do it? What evidence is out there that it works and how do you evolve a pedagogical model that both rings true in terms of epistemology but also allows the ludic and enjoyable elements of gaming to come to the fore?

Fortunately there are some great practitioners up and down the country doing some great work that is beginning to bear fruit in terms of research.

EXEMPLARS OF GAMING IN EDUCATION - “SOME PRACTITIONERS”

I could mention a host of people but, for now, I will mention a handful of pioneers - there are many many more educators following in their footsteps.

TOM BARRETT‘S ENDLESS OCEAN

First up, inevitably, is Tom Barrett, look at his blog postings about the use of games as a medium of delivering the curriculum:

http://edte.ch/blog/tag/endless-ocean/

DAWN HALLYBONE

Look also at Dawn Hallybone’s project using Nintendo DS consoles in Class:

Notice the amount of planning to make the games as intuitively and genuinely pertinent to curricular activity and skills and the planning of social activity “around” games to create “real life” community activity in both exemplars. Notice too the outcomes both academic and social.

OLLIE BRAY AND CONTEXTUAL HUBS

Ollie Bray’s use of Guitar Hero as a Bridging project on a wider scope should also be pointed out here - he goes into the “Contextual Hub” idea rapidly emerging in his excellent blog posts here:

http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/guitar_hero/

DEREK ROBERTSON

No pantheon of gamer educators could pass by without Derek Robertson and his work with Ollie at the Consolarium - his latest podcast on the use of Samba de Amigo and the allied learning “around” the game and the resulting social infrastructure and bonding between schools is just the latest case study in a long list of very successful gaming projects that bring authenticity of learning and fun into the classroom.

TIM RYLANDS

Lastly anyone who has seen Tim Rylands working with Myst and the activities he binds pupils into “around” and “interweaved with” the program is also a case study in how to blend the playful and engaging into the curriculum and achieve palpable outcomes.

What do all these people have in common?

They are:

• early adopters
• risk takers
• self-starters
• highly reflective about their practice
• highly innovative
• blog in detail about what they do
• use social media in a tightly focused way for professional development
• build extremely focused communities of practice with their peers
• have the vision and confidence to muster and orchestrate gaming resources to bind into the curriculum
• evolve both hyperlocal and wider scale educational social communities and events

I could go on and list more and more qualities but then I’m not a researcher, merely a videographer and documenter of the activity.

ITS ALL ABOUT THE PEOPLE STUPID

What comes across most forcibly for me is that all these individuals are at the hub of social activity that has engaged and transformed learning in their local area and that they have managed to amplify this practice globally to a wider set of educational professionals.

This is the beginnings of much of future education in the 21st century - these individuals and many others are beginning to transform how we plan and execute the curriculum; making learning more relevant and fun for future generations. I for one, welcome that change.

They may only be using “make believe” but they are deadly serious in their intent to transform and improve teaching and learning. Through the TeachMeet movement and multi channel social media they are beginning to effect change in this area and anyone who wants to know more would be well advised to subscribe to their blogs and follow them on Twitter.

COMING EVENTS ON GAMING AND EDUCATION

MIRANDAMOD GAMES AND LEARNING

On March 9th 2010 - I will be filming and live-streaming the MirandaMod session on Games Based Learning - sign up for the debate and the Wiki here:

http://mirandamod.wikispaces.com/Games+%26+Learning

There will also be a Flash Meeting as well - it all kicks off at 16:00 hours. We hope you can join us.

TEACHMEET GAMES

There is also a TeachMeet GameOn on at the Games Based Learning Conference on March 29th