play think learn

I found this useful page of links to game creation resources. I’ve not really had time to look at any of these tools in detail but thought I would post the link before I forget it.

At first glance this ‘rapid interactivity builder‘ is a neat tool. It enables the creation of interactive rich media elements for online learning. It’s very easy to use, looks pretty, there’s a large selection of templates and examples that can be simply customised, and there’s even an attempt to link different types of interactivity to pedagogic theories (although I’m not convinced, for example, that dragging flags onto a map really represents the evaluation phase of Bloom’s taxonomy).

My problem with this tool is that with the vast majority of the templates the type of learning activity and level of interactivity seems trivial: drag-and-drop, roll-overs, page turning. While I think there is desperate need to incorporate more interactivity into online learning, and a tool like Raptivity would be very useful in the respect that it allows lecturers to simply create their own content, I would like to see interactivities that really promote deep learning rather than the somewhat simplistic examples provided here.

(Beware also, if you decide to download the trial version of this tool, don’t give genuine contact details unless you really like talking to salesmen.)

I’ve recently discovered three interesting blogs that, while not all being directly associated with game-based learning, are definitely worthy of a mention from the technology-enhanced learning perspective.

• My colleague, Jonathan Savage, writes about teaching, learning and research in the arts, particularly in the area of music technology.
• The blog for the Pathfinder Project at De Montfort University has a range of interesting thoughts and links to a variety of stuff around Web 2.0 for learning.
• Dan Hon’s Extenuating Circumstances contains links in loads of areas, including game design and digital storytelling.

Even if this game was rubbish, the title alone makes it worth a mention.

I’m stuck already.

I’m back in York for another two-day project meeting (different project this time). Yesterday we had to sit through a presentation from each project at the meeting. All 28 of them. Fair enough, each had only 5 minutes and one PowerPoint slide, but three-and-a-half hours later I was dreaming of having hot knives shoved under my fingernails to end the tedium.

Why is it that in a profession that espouses active, experiental and engaging learning, we still have conferences and meetings full of exposition with text-laden PowerPoint? There’s got to be another way, I’m just not sure what it is…

Terry Mayes blogged in a similar vein about the ASCILITE conference (see that final paragraph of the post).

Last week I was part of an ‘expert panel’ arranged by Pure Usability as part of a web site redesign process. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the day (being full of cold and more than usually grumpy) but was pleasantly surprised at how it managed to be interactive and engaging throughout.

We took part in a range of activities including critiquing the existing site, discussing our patterns of use, designing our ‘ideal’ web sites, examining and prioritising our organisational affiliations, and a categorisation exercise. We were even allowed to use coloured pens and drawing paper. All good.

Of particular interest to me, however, was the model of motivation we were introduced to, which I had not come across before, and used six factors of motivation visualised as a spider diagram. These factors were: achievement, power, respect, novelty, beauty and meaning. I’ve not been able to find out where this model comes from, although there are clearly similarities with the esteem and self-actualisation components of Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation.

I’ve just been introduced to the work of Richard Bartle, inventor of the original multi-user dungeon, and the Bartle Test, which is used to analyse the personality types of MMORPG players. While the test itself would be unlikely to stand up to academic scrutiny owing to the dicotomous nature of the questions and inherent assumptions about the respondant, the analysis of player types is interesting in itself.

Bartle says that there are four categories of player (although an individual’s profile is based on his or her ranking of preferences):

• Achievers, who want to own stuff and have visible trappings of power and status;
• Explorers, who want to discover things and find out stuff;
• Socialisers, who want to play and interact with other people;
• Killers, who (unsurprisingly) want to kill stuff.

I wonder if they apply to the real world too?