[Anna Warren]

Thanks for those suggestions, Leonie – I’ll definitely look those up 🙂

I have been reflecting on your Twitter experience over the last couple of days as it definitely resonated for me (and made me feel surprisingly relieved that someone else had those experiences!). It has spurred me on to have another concerted go with it, rather than be a serial “retweeter”! I’m at a day conference soon so I think I need to bite the bullet and give it a go 🙂

Anna

[Anna Warren]

Hi James,

If we are concerned with getting “side tracked” from the learning – are we saying that there is a prescriptive route that needs to be taken in order for learning to occur? The reason I ask this, other than to be slightly provocative (!) is that I was involved in running some teaching sessions in World of Warcraft. It was really quite striking how much “unintended” and additional learning took place that hadn’t been part of the intended learning outcomes of the sessions. Our choice of game was deliberate – we wanted to explore the educational / learning possibilities afforded by a commercial off-the-shelf  (COTS) game. As a massively multiplayer online (MMO) and  pervasive game, we lacked a fair bit of control over the environment and what events might transpire. Each session was markedly different whilst still having the same basic outline structure. It was a calculated risk not to use a “walled garden” and all the participants had already had a fair degree of experience of learning in and using Second Life prior to this. I think in general the benefits outweighed the problems.

There are some excellent examples of WoW being used in education for management purposes, citizenship, economics etc. Whilst, as you say, they are designed purely for income generation, I think it’s possible to harness the deeply immersive experience and seamless design to great effect.

As an aside – interesting to note that you also had a similar reaction to Notpron as Sue and I!

Anna

[Anna Warren]

Hi Sue,

Although I commented on your blog, I thought I’d update you… My (very logical) partner hit a wall at level 6, lost his patience and gave up!

It’s an interesting claim on the front page of the site that:

16473100 visitors since August 2004

Only 29 people have been certificated for finishing the game.

That’s about 0.0001% of all players.

Notpron has 140 levels.

So are we supposed to conclude from  that that the designers consider it to be a “successful” game?

Was it their intention that it would out-fox all but the sharpest (and tenacious!) of players?

I’m trying to imagine us designing learning where only 0.0001% of students would successfully complete the task! But joking aside, I think it’s a reminder for me of the need to design learning that is challenging, but achievable. That the purpose and the outcome needs to be clear and explicit, and that there needs to be timely reward and feedback!

Anna

[Anna Warren]

Thanks for the opportunity to look through this! It could usefully deployed here too after tales of “missing” dissertations!

I had a couple of thoughts: firstly, whether another step in the activity could include them sharing files with each other?

Secondly, I think there’s great scope here for an extension activity working on collaborative documents for group work assignments 🙂

(We’ve recently moved over to Google at our University and the potential for working on collaborative documents with colleagues has been rather exciting!)

Anna

[Anna Warren]

There’s a lot here that’s giving me pause for thought Leonie! Not least your experience of the lack of feedback due to a protected account – it’s a reminder really that we need to be mindful about how important feedback, and more to the point, timely feedback is in supporting and motivating learners!

I’m inclined to agree with you about some of the limitations of the model – is there another model that you think would work better here?

Anna

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