Virtual Learning Worlds

It never ceases to amaze me how much my blog, and now Twitter, have turned into quasi-personal content management systems. CMS might be too strong in this instance, but I find myself continually going back to my blog and twitter stream to find a URL or some nugget of information that I forget, but becomes relevant months or years later.

With that being said, I had to work on a flowchart recently. In the past I used Omnigraffle, but it was tedious to re-apply for a demo license each time I wanted to use it. So I hit the web and a colleague up for some ideas.

Webspiration - this is what I’m currently using for my project. My students found this over the summer and used it for a web design project. Not bad, but no features to export to my knowledge, only print. Very similar to Google Docs in that you can invite collaborators, track changes, see change logs and other nice collaborative features.

Gliffy - Suggested by the Frenchman, I also used this in the past. I probably should have stuck with this for my recent project, but I wanted to give other tools a shot.

SlickPlan - I do not have any experience with SlickPlan, but it appears to be made by web designers, for web designers. Worth checking out.

I finally stepped away from Warcraft for a bit to try a few other MMOs, namely Champions Online and Aion. Both games are solid to a point, but both games fall short where Warcraft succeeded:

Content.

Warcraft launched with an incredibly high number of quests (guided tasks that offer a variety of rewards in the game). The game provided all the players a common framework to work within, but also allowed players to experience the same content in different ways. Some quested with friends, others solo. Some became deeply involved in the lore of the world via the quest system, some simply clicked through the dialogue to get to the action. Regardless how you played, questing was a core framework. Quests in Warcraft was one large part of the success of the game, and also building a community of players that all had a common experience to bring them together.

On the professional side, I have witnessed many online communities emerge. Many fail, some limp along while few succeed. With a new position on the horizon, one of the challenges might be to build community. Luckily a PSU, we have a community in place already that is fairly successful, so it would be building off that community vs. creating community from the ground up.

I see a lot of commonalities between Blizzard’s implementation of a massive questing system and growing a successful online community.

1. Blizzard released Warcraft with thousands of quests. With an online community, it needs to BEGIN with a lot of things to do (IE: content). I once heard a colleague say “I created a forum and a shared space in the CMS, the community is created”.

2. Blizzard encourages people to form groups to complete some quests. Depending on the difficulty of the quest, it might require characters with diverse skillsets to be successful. Most successful online communities get a lot of value out of diverse audiences, adding new and vastly different perspectives on topics. Whether it’s avatars or people, providing challenges or insights that encourage diversity is important.

3. Provide infrastructure and get out of the way. Blizzard provides forums, fansite kits and an open API for the community to build interface additions that jive with varying playstyles. With online communities, often the originators or builders reach a point where they can decrease the amount of content they contribute, and allow the community to grow legs and spread from a single forum or hub into other areas, like Facebook and Twitter.

Building online communities is a tough nut to crack, but online games have been doing this since the mid 1990s. If tasked to create an online community of users, look for examples in other areas for ideas on how to successfully pull this off.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) begins today. As someone stated last week, “this is better than Christmas” for many gamers. All the major players come to E3 to promote things we’ve already heard about but also to unveil big projects. I’m looking forward to more information about the upcoming DJ music games as well as news on new motion controllers for all the major systems.

A few places where I’ll be following the news:
Joystiq
Kotaku

On a different note, it appears that some people are finally starting to mash Twitter into some interesting game concepts. BackChatter appears to be the same thing as a backchannel using twitter, just with a few game elements thrown in. Spymaster is in private beta, but appear to be more of a traditional game based on something similar to Mafia Wars (a popular Facebook game). Might need to see how these can fit into my courses for the fall.

I was talking with Cole a few weeks back about various types of social networking services, and he said something along the lines of “I’m not getting much out of Facebook. I wish I could go back and start all over with that one.”

So the question of the day: Why not? Why not start all over with a social service if you’re not getting the maximum benefit?

I certainly understand why some people would not want to do this (keeping networks intact, not wanting to lose touch with certain people, etc), but part of the beauty of these sites is that we can re-create ourselves. Personal growth is a good thing right? As we grow older we (hopefully) get more mature, gain new wisdom, meet new people and learn. So it only makes sense that as we grow our identity (online or otherwise) grows with us.

These sites also change as well. Twitter has gone from a helpful way to share information with friends to something that is being shoved down my throat every 10 minutes on TV (Note to ESPN and commercial producers: PLEASE stop!!! We get it, you found out how to use twitter). My RSS reader has gone from something I used to visit every day to a collection of seemingly unrelated websites that have either disappeared or only receive updates on rare occasions.

Rebuilding my Facebook identity isn’t something I’m interested in right now (I like what I get out of that community), but my twitter and RSS reader need to go. With that being said, I think it is time to ditch bloglines, setup Google reader and start to create a new data stream that will help me think critically about topics I care about. It is also time to jump into Twitter and delete everyone I am following (there a batch command for this?) to build a new network for myself, one that hopefully adds more value.

On a sidenote, I just updated the site to the new Wordpress install as well as a new theme. Look for more content updates shortly and more restructuring of some of the widgets.