Virtual Learning Worlds

I’m still primarily a PC gamer. I have an Xbox, have a Wii, have played games on a PS3 many times, but the PC is where the majority of my gaming time is spent. For me, it’s a matter of the mouse + keyboard vs. the controller. Well, primarily the mouse. It’s more accurate, easier to use, more intuitive and simply navigates both the worlds and the menu structures much easier than a controller.

People have claimed PC gaming is ‘dying’ for many years now. Initially these discussions stemmed from popular games like Halo and God of War only appearing on consoles (eventually receiving PC ports). Many good games have arrived on consoles first, but because they turn into cash-cows for the publishers, they usually make it to the PC. So I don’t buy this argument regarding PC gaming being on the decline.

Enter Steam, Valve’s digital distribution platform. I’m a HUGE Steam fan, buying the majority of my games from the service. I was a little irritated that Dragon Age: Origins on Steam did not release at midnight on release day. No, on the east coast, it actually unlocked at about 3PM on release day. For some reason Modern Warfare 2 didn’t unlock on Steam until 2-3 days after its midnight release in the States. Is this the trend for the foreseeable future? Are PC gamers going to be left behind, literally, when AAA titles come out in favor of the brick-and-mortar outlets?

A decade ago, most games were developed for PC, then ported to consoles. That trend has now reversed. Again, I single out Modern Warfare 2, where the developers neglected to even change some of the language for the PC port, where users are getting messages like “Reconnect to Xbox Live” and “Press the right trigger to fire”. I ran into similar messages in Far Cry 2 on the PC. This is what we have to look forward to, PC gamers.

Finally, this weekend I decided to play through Dragon Age: Origins a second time and wanted to grab all the Downloadable Content (DLC). In an effort to give purchasers an added bonus, the game shipped with a special code you can redeem for a DLC pack that contained a new quest line as well as a new party member, Shale. I believe this was done to encourage people to buy the game new vs. used (the code is a 1-time use). When I couldn’t figure out how to redeem my pre-order information for the DLC pack, I found this on the BioWare website:

* The Stone Prisoner is available through first purchase redemption. A Rave card containing a code and download instructions will be available. The Rave card is not available with digital download copies of the game. The Stone Prisoner can be purchased seperately.

Irritated, I went to the BioWare store and found that the Stone Prisoner is a $15 download (that came FREE for PC/Xbox/PS3 pre-orders in retail stores). The other DLC pack, the Warden’s Keep, is a $7 download.

That’s $22 for DLC, nearly half the price of the game itself. You would think that sending digital customers a redemption code via email would be easier (and cheaper) vs. printing and sending a “Rave Card” with a code on it.

I’ll stop ranting now. I guess it’s time to go master the Xbox controller…

I was going to do this in an email, then I realized putting together the recipient list might take the better part of the morning, and I still would probably forget to include people I’ve worked with over the last ten years. Starting tomorrow, 11/17/09, I’ll be working for the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence (SITE) at Penn State. I’m very excited to start working with Undergraduate Education across the Penn State system to better the student learning experiences around the State. Also, the position is an academic appointment, primarily research-focused, so I will be able to put the Ph.D. degree to use immediately.

My 10+ years in IST has been a fantastic experience, and I wanted to thank everyone that I have worked with during this time. I’m going to avoid listing all the names (again, I’m sure I would forget people and that list would be LONG), but instead the areas I worked:

IST Solutions Institute - What a great experience. Working with a small team of highly innovative and skilled people, doing great things in the online learning space since October of 1999! I’m not sure I will ever experience such a unique culture and work environment as we had in SI. Thank you to everyone I worked with as a member of the Institute, I learned a great deal from everyone and had a fantastic time.

IST Instructor - From the PA Governor’s School for Information Technology, to IST undergraduate courses to guest lecturing in graduate courses around campus…I never realized I had a passion for teaching until given the opportunity to get in the classroom. Teaching can be equal parts fun and frustrating, but for me it has been a great learning experience and incredibly fun. Even with SITE, I am looking to continue my teaching experience at least once a year moving forward.

IST Research - I have been lucky to be part of many interesting and engaging research projects over the last three or four years. Looking at virtual worlds for learning and simulation, games as data analysis and design making environments to supporting several faculty in Second Life…I feel I have learned a great deal about grants and scholarly writing from all the colleagues I have worked with in this area.

Education Technology Services - My work with ETS grew from my work in the gaming and virtual world space with IST. Getting the educational gaming commons up and running was a monumental challenge, but extremely rewarding. I hope the EGC continues to do great things and I plan on staying involved as an affiliate.

Office of Learning Initiatives - my time with OLI was short, but still a good experience. Good luck to everyone working on the new online learning initiatives, you have a large task at hand that will be very challenging to meet, but I’m sure you will exceed expectations.

Back to your normally scheduled game and virtual worlds posts in the near future!

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.