Virtual Learning Worlds

NASA announced a gaming initiative a couple years back, and it looks like we might have our first glimpse of the results with Moonbase Alpha. A recent article describes NASA’s goal with the game:

The game is a proof of concept to show how NASA content can be combined with a cutting-edge game engine to inspire, engage and educate students about agency technologies, job opportunities and the future of space exploration.

The game does look somewhat interesting, based on the short teaser video embedded below. My big question: but is it fun? The video makes the game look rather dry, aside from the part where you pilot a robotic rover across the surface of the moon. I understand that a big part of this is to educate, but part of the magic of games is the fun factor, which leads to a huge impact on engagement. We talk a lot at ’serious game’ conferences about the balance of fun vs. educational content. With the audience NASA is shooting for (K-12 I’d wager), this game has to be fun first, with the educational content built-in to the flow of the gameplay. If this was a captive audience, maybe you could get away with focusing on the content first and the fun second…but that is not the case here.

A fairly successful indi studio, Zombie Cow, recently unveiled their new effort, Privates. From their website:

Privates is a funky little game about tiny little condom-hatted marines going right up peoples’ rude areas and shooting all the nasty chompy things that tend to live there if you’ve been carelessly putting bits of yourself in silly places.

Ok, I think you can read that one of two ways:
1. This is going to be a fairly gross, disturbing game where you encounter gross things inside peoples’ bodies (ala Southpark’s Leminwinks episode).

2. This is going to be a game with an educational component, where the player has to learn about the body to succeed.

I get the feeling they are leaning more towards #2 than #1. Microsoft recently reported the game might not pass peer review process to launch on Xbox Live based on what they’ve read so far regarding the context of the game. Dan Marshal, a co-founder of zombie cow, chimed in:

…it’d be a shame if a huge number of teenagers missed out on some quality gaming and vital education because of some abstract, cellular-level innards and pubic hairs.

Here’s to hoping that they can get the game past peer review with Microsoft AND it’s a good game with some interesting educational aspects integrated into the gameplay.

A colleague, Steve Thorne, has a research project underway looking at language learning inside of World of Warcraft. His theory, backed by past experiences, is language acquisition happens quicker in very context sensitive, directed scenarios. Games fall into that category, as do things like social networking sites (another environment Steve is looking into in terms of language learning).

The current experiment that I’m helping with specifically looks at English as a second language (ESL) students playing WoW. Already we are seeing an increase in language gains, not so much from the person-to-person interaction like we initially thought, but from the person-to-computer interactions. For example, the quest system. In order to grasp the story and the context for the quests, players need to be able to read the quest dialogue.

This got me thinking to language games for children. I’m a big fan of Bioware games (like Mass Effect and Dragon Age). What if a designer put together a children’s story using the Bioware framework of games, requiring the child to pick-and-choose their path through the game? The game wouldn’t be about language learning in an overt or obvious way, but children would need to understand language in order to play the game. Additionally, using the same framework, you could also teach children about different types of behavior. In Mass Effect, for example, you have the option to make very aggressive, sometimes violent decisions (called Renegade) or very good-willed, lawful decisions (called Paragon). A similar framework could be leveraged for kids to teach and reinforce things like honesty, forgiveness, sharing and much more.

Here’s a short example of how the Bioware system works. Look for the small wheel-shaped menu throughout the video in the lower middle of the screen. This is how all the interactions take place between you and the computer-conrtolled characters you interact with throughout the game.

The new job is keeping me very busy and I unfortunately haven’t had time to write much…at least not here. Two recent bits of gaming news caught my attention:

1. Harmonix, the creators of the original Guitar Hero game and now the Rock Band franchise, is offering courses at Berkleemusic.com.

Say what?

Harmonix announced the Rock Band Network nearly a year ago, a place where musicians can go and upload their own, original music and distribute much like developers distribute software on Apple’s appstore (see an old post for more info). Creating and publishing music to the Rock Band Network is not trivial…it’s actually very difficult. In addition to providing musicians with tutorials online, Harmonix is going to offer courses via Berkleemusic.com (Berklee’s online learning efforts) to help artists and other industry folks get their tunes on the Rock Band Network and, as Harmonix puts it, get paid!

2. Metaplace, the recent brainchild of MMO industry veteran Raph Koster, has shut down. You can read the closing notification and closing FAQ on the Metaplace website. I had high hopes for Metaplace. It was on the web, built in flash. It had multiple worlds, all loosely coupled together. It had massive amounts of user generated content. It had an e-commerce engine supporting it all.

…and it failed. From what I can gather from the announcement, the business model simply was not working. At the end of the FAQ, they do talk about licensing the technology, and that is something they do NOT plan on doing.

Welcome back, Second Life! I’m unsure how Second Life has survived this long, but I have a feeling its relationships with companies such as IBM and government organizations certainly helps. Organizations aren’t exactly licensing Second Life from Linden Labs, but it is somewhat similar. Metaplace never really had a parrallel offering, something where government or academia could pay a small (or large in some instances) fee for virtual property and maintenance. In Metaplace it was all free…but you would think some model existed similar to Second Life to pull in the government, academic and maybe even corporate folks.

I know I was looking forward to exploring and maybe even migrating my College’s presence from Second Life to Metaplace.

I’ve leveraged wikis over the last 2 years for a wide variety of tasks, each time learning something new and valuable about how these platforms can be used. A few years ago, we used a wiki as a documentation repository for all the projects and tasks our unit was responsible. It helped a great deal if someone was sick for a workshop or had to deal with an emergency. Someone else on the team could quickly jump into the Wiki and help out. An unintentional finding during this experiment is that a wiki can help a great deal when it comes to turnover. A few people left the unit, and the new people got up to speed incredibly fast, being able to peruse the wiki and see all our projects mapped to personnel.

I’ve also used a wiki in one of my courses, where students were in teams tackling one of eleven different inter-related research topics. Phase one of the project was a basic literature review authored in the wiki. Phase 2 required each team to go out and read the other teams’ work, and create relationships between pages where the research topics intersected. The next time I teach an upper-level course, I will definitely use this assignment again.

I also use wikis for information retrieval, especially things like wikipedia and wowwiki.

So how does this play into games and learning? I first started using a wiki when I was in the Burning Crusade Beta test. If you’ve ever played WoW, often times you are toggling between the game and a web browser, checking wikis or item/quest databases to help guide your game experience. During a beta test, these databases are predominately empty because of how new the content is. With a wiki, we had thousands of people creating and editing pages as they were the first group of players to experience the new content. People were documenting quest storylines, monster types, new item drops…you name it, people were constantly in the wiki while they were playing, documenting everything. On one hand this is similar to the strategy guide scene in games, but the wiki method is MUCH faster and I would argue more accurate because many authors are contributing.

The same thing is taking place now with Dragon Age: Origins. This game came out just over a week ago, and similar to WoW I see thousands of people using this wiki to document the story arcs, races, classes, items and quests.

I refer to this type of activity as mutual knowledge construction, and I think it has huge potential value for education. But…

With games, those of us playing, and more importantly contributing to these wikis, are highly motivated. Whether intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, we are motivated to contribute to the massive collection of knowledge and information on these wikis. When I think of how to implement something like this in the classroom, this is where I struggle. In a graduate class I think this could work wonders, but in an undergraduate class, especially a general education class…I struggle to overcome the motivation barrier that I think is key to making something like this work. Hopefully this summer or fall 2010 I’ll have a chance to give this a go, asking students to collectively create a wiki over the course of the semester that both informs and motivates to dig deeper into a subject area. Once I have the assignment fleshed out, I’ll be sure to share.

I typically come across colleagues and individuals with varying views on *how* a game should be designed and implemented for education. I’ve heard a wide variety of opinions on this, but some themes re-emerge frequently:

• Educational games should be about EDUCATION first, and the game comes second. Most instructors that I talk with believe this is the right way to design educational games from the ground up.
• Educational games should be all-inclusive. If we’re going to teach a game about the stock market, it should be as accurate as possible and account for as many variables as possible to realistically illustrate how the market works and how people interact with the market.
• Educational games should be able to stand alone. A game about project management should include all relevant information on the subject so when a player completes the game, he/she now possesses a great deal of knowledge about the subject matter.

Personally, I do not put a lot of weight behind any of these views. Here’s why:

• If the game is about EDUCATION first and GAME second, the game is typically force-fitted around the educational content. What does this lead to? A very boring, dry game experience where you feel like you’re being hit over the head with specific information (similar to how my students feel if I lecture for 3 hours).
• Creating an educational game that is all-inclusive and realistic to account for many variables is very similar to designing a simulation. Games and simulations are nothing more than models, but simulations are typically modeled after the real world and strive for accuracy. Games are more abstract as designers have more freedom to make things less accurate in the hopes to appeal or motivate more people to interact with the software. If the goal is to have students learn and interact with an accurate model, use a simulation.
• The stand alone issue comes up frequently with faculty, and I simply can’t understand why I hear this so much. Some colleagues are looking for a game to replace a lesson plan, or series of lesson plans. If the game covers 90% of the lesson, but leaves out 10%, the game is dismissed. I counter that a lesson plan itself does not solely focus on a single medium to convey information. It’s a combination of lecture, assignments, quizzes and a variety of other items. Games are no different; they should be used in conjunction with other teaching tools. The area that games provide a huge benefit is in debriefing and reflection.

I came across the video below by Daniel Floyd and James Portnow that talks about games for learning, specifically tangential learning. It’s about 7 minutes long and contains some good examples of tangential learning at the end:

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For those of you that play World of Warcraft, this probably won’t be very interesting.  For those that do not play WoW, hopefully this illustrates some of the complexities and intricacies of the game.

I’m still working on several projects centered around YouTube.  I intend to make YouTube *THE* instructional platform for my Fall 2009 course (more on that later) and I’ve also been using YouTube to hopefully increase the rate of progression for my Warcraft Guild.  To help put this into context, we are a raiding guild.  We spend a couple nights a week in either 10-person or 25-man person groups, tackling very complex AI-driven encounters with dragons, demons and other evil pixel creations terrorizing Azeroth.  Let me stress the word COMPLEX, because many of these encounters take a very patient, scientific approach to defeat.

Our 10-person crew recently defeated one of the more difficult encounters Blizzard added to the game a little over a month ago.  Our guild is rather large and we have guildmates that will get to the same encounter soon.  Instead of having them struggle like we did to defeat this complex encounter, I used Fraps to record the encounter, documenting our strategy for success.

In addition to the video feed (which alone does not provide a great deal of insight), I also added annotation using the YouTube annotation features, to provide time-sensitive information about the encounter as people watched it.  These encounters in Warcraft can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, from a single phase to multiple phases, which EVERYONE needs to understand because these game mechanics and how players react to them dictate sucess or failure.  Often times when someone ‘teaches’ the rest of the raid about the encounter, it is done using Ventrilo (a VoIP service) and takes 5 to 10 minutes.  Sounds a lot like a lecture, right?  For the very detailed encounters, this is information overload to the extreme!  My hope is that videos like the one below will help the rest of my guild successfully defeat the more complex encounters, by providing annotated videos including the ventrilo talk on strategy.

As the PhD is rapidly coming to a close (fingers crossed), I’ve been thinking a lot about my future direction. Teaching is still at the top of the priority list. Each semester I tend to change a large percent of my materials to try new things, see if they work and constantly evolve what I’m doing. This semester I stumbled onto a duality of sorts.

For example, I had all the IST 110 students create ePortfolios. On one hand, I tried to teach them the elements that make a good ePortfolio. Good writing samples, reflection on past educational experiences, professionalism, etc. In the process, the students also learned how to create and manipulate web pages. Most of my assignments had this form of duality. I spent some time talking about designing user interfaces, then had the students create their own using Photoshop (or other image editing software).

I thought it would be a good idea to start tracking some numbers, and this is the best place for me to do that.

In spring 2009 I taught two classes: IST 110 and IST 440w. Overall, I had the opportunity to interact with over 200 students ranging the entire spectrum of academic standing, from freshman to senior. Also, IST 110 was a general education section so I interacted with MANY students outside of IST. The breakdown:

• Students created 1,050 blog posts
• Students created 120 ePortfolios
• Students created 120 user interface comps
• Students created 24 Public Service Announcement videos
• Students created 11 prototypes in the context of new business ventures
• Students created 60 podcasts

Total: 1,385 artifacts created this semester. I feel pretty dam good about that. Once the summer opens up and I have more time to write, I’ll try and illustrate the reasoning behind all this creation.

I’m still not sure the title of this entry reflects the content of the post…but it’s the first thing that came to mind. A few colleagues and many others are taking part in an event called “Hacking Education” going on right now. I don’t have a lot of time to put thoughts around all the great things I’ve read already coming out of the conference, but I come across a great post by Jeff Jarvis (thanks April!) that illustrated some of the thinking behind this.

Call me a utopian but I imagine a new educational ecology where students may take courses from anywhere and instructors may select any students, where courses are collaborative and public, where creativity is nurtured as Google nurtures it, where making mistakes well is valued over sameness and safety, where education continues long past age 21, where tests and degrees matter less than one’s own portfolio of work, where the gift economy may turn anyone with knowledge into teachers, where the skills of research and reasoning and skepticism are valued over the skills of memorization and calculation, and where universities teach an abundance of knowledge to those who want it rather than manage a scarcity of seats in a class.

With my PhD nearly complete, I do have dreams of teaching at a teaching-centered university, fully intent on breaking old traditions and leading by example in new ways to reach students (and students reach me, for that matter). In addition to following these types of conversations online, I picked up a copy of Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. After reading the introduction, I felt similar to when I read the above quote: I couldn’t agree more! Our educational system is in such a rut, how will we ever recover? Then I realized that this book was published in 1971, and everything cited during the intro STILL holds true today.

Our system is (and has been for a LONG time) screwed up all the way to the core.

In Don Norman’s book Design of Everyday Things he alludes to two types of knowledge:
1. Knowledge in the world
2. Knowledge in your head
Taking this out of Norman’s design context, I think this is a HUGE part of why everything is screwed up. We are testing students at all levels in the educational system for knowledge in the world. That is, knowledge that is easily found by simple searches, often times within seconds of a question being asked. Why do we test students on this type of knowledge? It only ever becomes knowledge in the head for a short time period, then it is gone. The ‘knowledge in the head’ should be things like scientific discourse, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity…these are THE skills individuals MUST know to be successful.

end rant

Brian pointed this out today via Twitter: David Wiley of Brigham Young University is structuring his course similar to a role playing game, where students take on the role of an artisan, a bard, a merchant, or a monk (typical character classes in RPGs). If he follows the conventional RPG model, these students will form teams, each consisting of a combination of specific character classes. Professor Wiley succinctly points out why this is a worthy experiment:

Although he’s using a game metaphor, Mr. Wiley says that dividing students up into teams and asking them to work on group projects are time-tested teaching techniques — ones that the best video games happen to make use of. “If you reverse-engineer a popular multiplayer game, they’ve somehow encoded all these things about what good learning ought to look like,” he argues. “Instead of just learning how to kill orcs, we can use these really effective techniques for honest-to-goodness educational content.”