play think learn

I was down in London yesterday for the final meeting of the Pathfinder projects. After two hours of being talked at in the morning I was beginning to think it was all a bit of a waste of time, but fortunately the afternoon changed my mind. This was the chance for some of the projects to talk about what they had achieved in more detail, and was really inspiring.

I was particularly impressed by the work that has been going on at Gloucestershire University on digital storytelling. This looks like a fantastic way of supporting students to get their ideas across in an engaging and effective manner. There’s a great set of resources on storytelling on their site too.

Read a really interesting post on formal and informal learning and the impact of social networks on Sarah Robbins‘ blog.

The slideshow is well worth a view, particularly the exploration of the differences between what university education and social networks provide, and new conceptions of the role of the teacher in Higher Education:

• teaching students to learn in an information economy;
• guiding students to shape their own paths;
• enabling students to access professional networks;
• modelling lifelong learning practices;
• relating as a more experienced community member.

I wholeheartedly agree with Sarah’s analysis, but feel - from my experience with both university staff - that we are still a long way away from this being an accepted model. I think that true teacher commitment to this paradigm is essential for its success - but this re-framing of role and loss of control clearly isn’t easy. I am really interested in ways to get lecturers to think about re-conceiving education - and ways to create the autonomous teacher as well as learner.

With an urgent and barely-started article due by the end of the day, it was never going to be an easy afternoon. Time to catch up on my blog reader then.

Twenty minutes were already happily displaced when I came across TypingTest.com (thanks Adrian) and before I knew it another hour had passed. Just what is it about this little test that makes it so addictive? For me, I think it hinges on three things:

1. knowing how well someone else scored, and that score being hard to achieve - but possibly within reach - means that the competitive devil in me won’t let it lie;
2. it’s easy to make really fast improvements in speed (albeit at the expense of accuracy - but you can’t have everything);
3. it is very short to play (1-3 minutes) so it’s really easy to think “I’ll just have one more go”, then another, then another… “oh where did that hour go?”

Think I probably need to do some more in-depth analysis on this site before I get back to my article.

It would be hard to write a blog post about typing games without giving a mention to TyperShark - this is still one of my favourite web games ever.

There are times I really wish I lived in London. The Hide and Seek festival is taking place between the 27th and 29th June in and around the Southbank Centre. It is a long weekend of pervasive games (defined by Alex Fleetwood, the festival director, as “essentially taking game mechanics that we used when we were kids, like ‘hide and seek’ or ‘it’ … and transforming them into grown-up urban games”.

This looks so cool.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’I always wondered how long it would take someone to create ‘Second Life’ within Second Life (would that be Third Life?).

I’m trying to write a paper on the potential of alternate reality games in education for an urgent deadline this afternoon, so am very easily distractible at the moment and have been studiously ignoring my blog feeds. However, when an interview with ARG designer Hazel Grain appeared I felt I could legitimately be sidetracked.

The interview provides a excellently succinct overview of what an ARG is and also highlights some of the practical issues associated with developing and running them. I love that this a gaming genre in which immersive and compelling games can be created by such a small team and that the focus is on imagination and creativity rather than on a technical wow-factor. The interview also talks about The Sky Remains, a new futuristic detective-story ARG that looks really cool.

Unfortunately the paper also remains, so I will have to leave it until another day.

Why have I spent the morning so far finding a cuddly toy, photographing it and creating a Twitter account for it?

The answer is here. Looks like it should be a lot of fun.

The link to the Passively Multiplayer Online Game has been sitting in my ‘to investigate’ list untouched for a couple of weeks as I was worried that when I started playing I wouldn’t get any work done at all. Fortunately, while this game is undoubtably cool, I’m not totally addicted (yet).

PMOG is essentially a FireFox extension that allows you to play while you surf the web, collecting Datapoints and undertaking missions. So far the missions I have completed involved navigating through a series of web sites and reading the message attached to each one; I love the way that the game allows you to interact with existing sites within the browser in new ways that only other players can see - adding treasure, laying mines, and providing new layers of links.

I can see an immediate application for this sort of game for creating guided tours of web sites, highlighting resources for students and sharing information online. However, I think I’m not totally immersed yet because so far it has been limited to navigating the web - but then I have only been playing for a day and am still officially a ‘newbie’. I look forward to undertaking new missions and hopefully uncovering a whole new layer of interactivity.

And I call this work… :o)