Reaction creates attraction

The recent debacle over Jo Kay’s SLEducation wiki has provided a wave of new discussions around Virtual Worlds in Education. It has raises discussions around the idea that Second Life is not THE virtual world for education, just one execution of it – and what if we used something else?

Many of those who have been writing, developing and researching are clearly past the critical flack of the initial beach landing, have overcome the initial ‘yeah but’ barrage from the sand dunes and are confidently aligning virtual worlds and games with learning and assessment.

Unlike a great deal of Web2.0-ness, virtual worlds are long supported by a wealth of academic research to suggest they are extreamly good at motivating students and offer high quality instructional design environments for learning.

Obviously not everyone is going to explore them. The biggest barrier is that in muves the experience has to be instructively designed to create opportunities that extend beyond it and facilitate experiences that cannot be created without it – Who has the time to do that?

Well lots of people actually, not least the students we are teaching and certainly the multi-billion dollar technology industry.

A flood of educators followed Kerry Johnson’s footsteps into Reaction Grid, a community of inter-connected Open Simulators.

The discussions have not been about whether Second Life is better, but how it changes pedagogical opportunities. I am yet to hear from teen-educators that Linden is easy to deal with, or overly keen to help – quite the opposite. But Lindens notice to Jo felt like a wake up call to lots of Second Life Educators.

Maybe it was time to get past what we can’t do and look at what we can. As blog posts appeared online last week over Jo and Sean’s well established (and Linden referenced) wiki there was a flurry of new activity – not about the wiki issue, but in going right around the problem – which was all about ownership and trademarks, not community. We get the idea of trademarks by the way.

The Jokaydia Second Life community flocked into Reaction Grid and Jo Kay has established a new outpost to allow Second Life educators to explore Reaction Grid with the same level of support, resources and expert development you’d expect.

There’s also an ISTE2010 conference proposal via  Judy and Vicki Davis that was put together via iPhones and Google Docs in a few hours this week to meet the call for proposal deadline.

In the next few months, there will be open resources and open spaces in Reaction Grid created for teachers to explore with students – and this will lead to further instances of students read, writing and making things outside of them. Some will be online – and perhaps some will be downloadable – able to run on local machines as stand alone or LAN learning objects. Imagine being able to download a unit of work around Huxley’s Brave New World and run it on your nice new DER laptops using open source resources – offline. Giving students a zip file to unpack and run for homework, where they have to model mathematical problems. Virtual school in a virtual world.

Change comes from places you least expect and creates opportunities you never imagined. You get into Reaction Grid for FREE. Join us at 9pm AEST on Sunday night – because that is where the new curriculum in being crafted. You can google it.

Aion Video Podcast Episode 3: East Meets West

Digital Story telling is now a very valuable skill. Not just for film makers who make these kinds of clips, but because those in the clip are critical thinkers. This podcast is about the process of creating motivating games – though incremental improvement or peer offerings and new narratives. Aion has been in the wings for a long time, and over the last year there has been an opportunity not just to pre-order the game, but to be part of the development journey. This podcast (one in a series) is a great example of how story telling is evolving. Podcasting in the classroom? Perhaps the first steps to a career in film or game? “It not just the game or the action, it’s the challenge that keeps players coming back” – that would be a great thing to say about classrooms.

more about “Aion Video Podcast Episode 3: East Me…“, posted with vodpod

Unity3D

There are times, when I see something new and think, oh my god. Game changer. Unity3D is that.

It might not look much here, but go and see how fast it loads, how graphically rich it is, how it deals with sound, runs on a browser, allows flash like interactions, and is already in commercial use on multiple consoles and even iPhone.

Spend 20 minutes playing with it, watching it, using it – then ask yourself – why do I still believe that content and online experience will not move from my computer to my phone, my car, my wall or my console. Here’s a starter world just to get you immersed. As you are looking at this think about all the flash content you’ve used … blend it all together with game-play and instructional design – and you can see why game and content developers are flocking to it. Before you rush off, you may remember playing Timez Attack - the Mathematics Video game … it’s on Unity3D.

Still feeling left out? Not into solo games – how about a serious game, WolfQuest, where multiple players form a wolf pack and explore life – well, as wolf. Why is it serious? – Because it is instructionally designed for a real zoo and real organisation to engage kids in a social game, to learn about the environment. It’s co-produced with an educational developement company – EduWeb – a to me represents a new avenue for educators to explore professionally – designing learning for immersive environments. Taking ‘play’ and wrapping it in ‘learning’ is what games based learning is all about. Unity3D is just another technology changing the role of teachers online and why teachers can ill afford to limit themselves to teaching procedural functions of computer and Internet use.

Infinate Ammo and Indie Games

“I believe that video games are not only entertainment – but art. My purpose is to create interactive experiences that come from the heart – worlds in which people may explore, feel, think and play.”

Alec Holowka is a game designer, programmer and composer from Winnipeg, Manitoba. Infinite Ammo is home to his personal projects and collaborations with other talented independent game developers. Indie Games are fertile grounds for artists of all kinds and programmers, resulting in hundreds of great examples. Their work demonstrates the power that is in the bedrooms and home-office-studios around the word in a community that is producing a wide range of games with agendas not purely driven by commercial gain.

Teachers may be using applications like ‘Scratch’ in the classroom; but the idea of ‘games’ today is not about geeks cutting code (not that it ever has) – it’s about story telling. For teachers willing to explore new narratives, looking up the Indie Game community (http://tigsource.com/ and http://offworld.com/) will reveal some very talented people, producing some inspirational work – that is accessible. It also demonstrate how collaboration is more than comment and paste, but allows them to begin to understand how large projects can be achieved by teaming up with people who have complimentary skills and ideas to yours.

They are great ways to engage students with writing, from a review, or writing new matrial – away from programming and ICT. And of course they can put their review in the blog comments or even contact the game makers directly. These people are far more accessible that GTA developers. Accessibility is key to student eLearning – they have to see what they are doing as novices leading somewhere later.

Wayne Gretzky, hockey legend said “I skate where the puck in going to be, not where it has been”.

Exploring Indie Games will introduce students to the idea that games are not only made by huge studios with mega-budgets – but there is art and craft to be learned and shared. Here is a great place to start looking. Games are stories we can shape and immerse ourselves in socially, not just as players, but as developers. Just like blogging really, but with code. Is there a market for Indie Games? YES – How many students play Newgrounds and Miniclip? – Is the game industry moving away from physical media? of course. There are some great games out there, such as Time Donkey, and better still these people are on Twitter, on Ustream, they blog and they talk back. Accessible, authentic motivation, you bet.

FarmVille or FarmTown?

Click here for more information and to register for your free tickets

The fastest growing social game in history is FarmVille, according to social games developer Zynga – who also make more tween-teen social world, YoVille and Pirates. The are micro-worlds embedded inside a social network, and not simply a game, but a complex systems requiring high levels of problem solving, persistence and digital literacy all designed to work inside a larger organisation. It has rules, conventions and relies on beviour modeling from ‘other players’. To put this into perspective – Zynaga is TWICE as big as Twitter. Its also profitable. But educators are not flogging Zynaga as a social construct tool in the same way. Hmmm.

FarmVille is a knock off of FarmTown (the other farming game on Facebook), pointing to the fact that singularity is not critical to users. If your friends play FarmVille, you play FarmVille. With FarmVille, you play, invest and express yourself by growing and harvesting a variety of crops for money and game points. It trains the player to think about ‘micro-payments’ – which the games industry sees as a significant future method of obtaining revenue. You can invest in your farm by buying fruit trees and farm animals such as pigs and cows. They are claiming that this is or about to be the biggest game in the world. To me it represents a social-micro game, and it’s appeal is that non-gamers can play together in using a competitive theme that really is a throw back to childhood games for many of the 11 million daily players on Facebook. It breaks the rule of first mover advantage and to me represents what we know about the internet; if you can see it, you can rethink it. As many of todays early 20s spent time at school and home (yes!) playing Mini-CLip and Addicting Games – all micro, casual games – FarmVille is a very familiar presentation mashed with social themes. It is also the number one application on Facebook.

People have talked about the effect celebrates have had on Twitter to increase adoption, but in Facebook – FarmVille has mashed social-networking with social-gaming. Youth online already spends more time in social-gaming that anything else, so this represents a cross over to virtual worlds. FarmVille is significant because of Facebook’s demographic and usage patterns and the format may perhaps encourage teachers to change their often prejudicial view of games, and therefore adopting some of the learning and teaching strategies that are embedded in them. Personally, I don’t play FarmVille or FarmTown, so please don’t invite me, I did enough farming in AOE2 for one lifetime. So why blog about it? – because its a clear signal that educators should be exploring beyond blogs and wikis in the classroom – and considering how the methods and processes in social-games can be adapted into learning frameworks. I am not saying play FarmVille in class, but at least consider how social-games might play a role in motivating and engaging students. This means in simple terms; virtual worlds are Facebook’s most significant application draw.

How to assess international spys

DISTANCE students in an International Security course at Macquarie University are about to play games. The are playing the roles of people who might potentially be making some of very important ones for real. It seems that the chances are, many conversations will happen over great distance as well as in the conference room. While on campus students can role-play their assessment in the comfort of the super-secret high tech lair, those distance students might have previously been given some alternative task. No fun in that, so now there is a weekly task held in world with their teacher.

Second Life is incredibly flexible in assessment of this kind. The course designer can create a ’shared reality’ by role-playing and facilitating an engaging environment for the students. Progressively over a two weeks; students have waded into virtual worlds – using online resources. The space is designed to be a ‘three click deal’. As they enter the space; they are automatically given note cards.

1. Click to arrive in-world in a realistic room with simple props. An automated note card pops up to give the student instructions on what to do next. It logs their attendance automatically with time and date.
2. Click the folder on the desk, marked top-secret. It provides some tips on effective role-play and presentation, so there is additional motivation to get some extra help that is normally shared or observed in physical space but not online.
3. Click to sit in the chair, read the briefing – and the assessment is recorded in real time; then given back to the student so they can reflect on their performance after grading. They are given a notecard at the end of the session with further reading and instructions in the main MQ building via a landmark and leave.

The instructional design for this was developed using simple storyboards in Apple Pages; and gradually we explored and expanded on the functionality and environment needed to bring absolute newcomers into a virtual world and undertake a very real assessment task. Each week, the students will get watch a video briefing from SL (we film them all in 15 mins in one session). So far, this has been met with real enthusiasm by the distance students and will be interesting to evaluate. In getting the solution for the students, the teacher has had to do some work too – and already has forgotten about trying to using …. I can’t say too much more …. I hear footsteps heading my way.

Beautiful puzzles and alco foil planets

SAMOROST is a beautiful browser based flash puzzle game. The animation, illustration. sound and character development is amazing. A stand out in the genre of online games and puzzles. The basic level is also FREE, loads fast and invites exploration! It is so visually rich that it can easily be used to create a digital story or narrative well outside the computer screen. The art is engaging and contemporary in young children’s animation right now that primary teachers would have no problem in using it to motivate a range of classroom activities. (Unless it’s DET in which case it might be blocked).

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if kids could play the game and create new stories and illustrations and make a book. Send the pictures and words to SnapFish, give the URL to parents – hey presto! It would be wonderful not hard. Hard is making alco foil planets and wire figures in a 3D animated film (oh damn, that’s not hard either – you don’t need a video camera or buy fancy software). Easy activity for K6.

You’re right – Samarost is a fantastic springboard for learning in many KLAs.
Here are some blog posts I wrote when I used it first with my Year 4, 5, 6 class in 2007.

http://tinyurl.com/mkhfbo

http://tinyurl.com/mno7q7

http://tinyurl.com/ng6up9

http://tinyurl.com/6evf5d

This game really helped open my eyes to the possibilities and opportunities of using games in the classroom.

Hope you get to use this game with a really lucky class soon!

Cheers

KimP

I’m going to facilitate a discussion on using simple games to promote motivational story telling at the Jokaydia Annual Unconference in Second Life 24/6 September. I hope anyone whos interested in using games and playful learning and storytelling will join the session which is free. Check here for all the information on this event – which is always amazing.

To cook up this lesson:
Tools needed: 3  Samorost , Snapfish and a digital camera – Learning curve for kids : Nil –  Learning curve for teachers : 1-2 hours

Zelda in the classroom

The Legend of Zelda is perhaps the best game franchises ever. Despite being an early console game; it’s ability to weave a narrative with great game play and puzzle solving earned it respect. Many of today’s game developers and story writers grew up on Zelda. Today you can grab an old console on eBay and still enjoy a great game in the classroom. Story telling via games is an increasingly lucrative place for writers, artists and animators – with countless media spin offs. The Zelda legend is something that can be incorporated into the classroom, from literacy to art or music in the same way many have used Myst. Zelda, like many games has a community – and this article gives some insight into why this type of game lives on. Alive and saving the princess – there’s just 4 weeks to finish your entry for the online fan-fiction, so really what more do you need to get started with games in the classroom.

Save the princess, save education.

In a Perfect World

IN A PERFECT WORLD everyone would be a great storyteller, and be able to create compelling narratives and imaging worlds and characters. If they were gifted at art, like this 6 year old, they could illustrate like Brian Froud. But we can’t. Most of us are pretty regular – even those who attend pay-to-learn schools. Games provide a narrative that students can use to build from. Who hasn’t come out of the movies with friends and talked about a better ending or how they disliked the character even though they should have loved them. Shared experience based on shared reality is what is driving social-networks – and can power classrooms.

PERFECT WORLD – is a high quality online MMORPG – that has a lot of detail in it’s story telling. The game’s Asian origins have afforded it an back story which in itself could be viewed as contemporary literature.

In an age when the Heavens were not yet stretched over the Earth, and Hell still silent beneath the lands of creation. When all creatures bright and dark had yet to grasp the first weapons and tools left behind by the gods and their children, there was the Void.

The game features three races, with two distinct classes. There are distinct race-requirements to play them there is a lot of variety in terms of what – and who – you’ll see running around. Of course, that also means that the more popular classes are in abundance. To make it more bearable, “Perfect World” features very detailed character customization. Hair, ears, nose, breast size, and more can all be tweaked, resulting in characters that look similar, but different enough to appear unique. So for those lamenting the lack of access to Teen Second Life – PERFECT WORLD, when aligned with outcomes – can offer a wide range of learning experiences. Yes it’s a game, but it is a social-game. The term ‘video game’ is far too facile to describe today’s interactive offerings. Yes some of the characters are not wearing their Sunday Church clothes – but then this is not 1809, and if we apply that logic – then we might as well close the internet and entertainment business down – the photo opposite is pretty typical of the ‘toons’ – and that is what they are … toons … just like moving, interactive paintings … and we study those in school now don’t we?

Video Games and Storytelling

Just watch it, all of it … zero punctuation style … just brilliant, and its for an art history class, apparently he makes one of these a week!