iterativelearning

One of the recent Floss Weekly episodes features an interview with Nichole Yankelovich of Open Wonderland. Open Wonderland is an open source, Java-based toolkit for creating virtual or immersive environments, and one of the specific audiences they target is education.

Because it’s a toolkit, instructors or schools can customize it to meet their specific learning needs. Another advantage appeals to those concerned with privacy. Because it runs behind a firewall, teachers don’t really have to worry about cyber-bullying or other sorts of pernicious behavior that students may have to contend with in more open virtual world environments such as Second Life. Shu Schiller has an interesting article on this article when using Second Life within the context of an MBA-Information Systems class. However, that said, schools or educators can work around this issue by getting a Second Life premium account for about $10 and so in the end, I guess it kind of boils down to one of those common software trade-offs: do the development work in-house and reap the benefits of greater customization, etc. or go with what amounts to a hosted option with less flexibility.

TechTrends has a good piece on virtual gaming and instructional design (Atusi Hirumi, Bob Appelman, Lloyd Rieber, and Richard Van Eck). It’s a great and timely article, but one of the more interesting sections is when they get to the design section. With the ADDIE model as their general framework, they bifurcate the design phase where the game designers work on things like side quests, obstacles, challenges, and puzzles and the instructional designers focus on developing Learning Task Maps that specify enabling and prerequisite skills needed to achieve the overall goal.

They move on to discuss how the relationship between goals and objectives can be more fluid than with many traditional design projects because game designers may want to develop a challenge that is directly related to the goal.

There has been lots happening on the education-video games front for quite some time now (James Paul Gee, Marc Prensky, AECT Virtual Educators, Educause Virtual Worlds). While all this research is helpful towards connecting the practice to relevant theory(ies), sometimes, teachers just want to dive in and explore what these games are all about. What are they like from an experiential perspective? Or very simply, what is it like to play the darn things?

Well, one option is Penn State University’s Gaming library that offers quite a few. For example, in the Environmental Science category, there is Operation Climate Control; moving more towards the Humanities end of the spectrum, there is The Playhouse which centers on Shakespeare. The game titles I saw were developed in Flash, so you can experiment with them directly in the browser. They’ve also got a page with additional resources on gaming (e.g., development tools, showcase), plus plenty more if you have the time.

Was glad to read in Henry Jenkins’ post of a PBS production on New Media and video games that gets away from an old, sky-is-falling perspective, namely one that envisions the relationship between kids and video games as a precipitous downward spiral. I like the way Jenkins puts it in terms of whose power of expression has been the most dominant and how this has reinforced such a belief.

In most cases, a bias towards the adult perspectives offered by parents and teachers over those advanced by young people, who often lacked a language through which to defend experiences which were clearly meaningful to them

I see an an interesting opportunity for instructional designers. Teachers could integrate a writing component where students, perhaps in small groups, draft an argument that lays out the case for the educational benefits they perceive in their interactions with this New Media and/or video game(s). Students could also extend this articulation through oral presentations.

Technorati Tags:
Henry Jenkins, PBS