I attended a seminar at the end of last term: ‘Using Games in E-Learning’ run by Liz Falconer and Manuel Frutos-Perez of E-learning Development, part of IT Services.
The seminar (in plush training rooms on the Business Park – all flat screens and interactive whiteboards) began with a presentation of gaming theories. This drew on ideas from Donald Clark of Epic Design
http://www.epic.co.uk. Below is a summary:
Games:
1. allow experimentation with ideas;
2. offer the opportunity to test concepts – ‘bringing theory to life’ in ‘safe environments’;
3. meet ‘student expectations of IT-supported learning’, i.e. because they have grown up with videogames, students today ‘expect to be in control of the medium’. Future learners are not like ‘us’, they have different experiences and are ‘digital natives’ whereas ‘we’ are ‘digital immigrants’;
4. ‘stick with you’
and of course:
5. we all enjoy playing
This diagram is I think also taken from a presentation by Clark
(would it make any more or less sense if the arrows went in the opposite direction?).
Two types of games were identified:
solo – logic puzzles, maths and linguistic games, decision games
social – roleplay, group simulations, team games, interactive storytelling (Liz has used such games in teaching concepts such as risk to social science students).
The next section of the seminar introduced us to a range of proprietory and open-source games and tools.
Hot Potatoes: easily constructed interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises that can be put into module webpages
Quandary: web-based ‘action mazes’ – again very easy to use, the software allows you to model decision processes in a playful way (it could, I reckon, be used to develop text and graphics adventure games).
both downloadable from:
www.halfbakedsoftware.com
javascript based games, and we also looked at some Flash and Shockwave educational games.
Blackboard’s communication tools also allow some ludic approaches too.
All these links are on the E-learning module pages on Blackboard.
http://online.uwe.ac.uk and click the resource-based learning module link. Go to the 'games' link. The powerpoint presentation that began the seminar is available, as well as a few links to journals and essays on games and simulation in e-learning.
I’ve emailed the username and password.
The seminar didn’t really address the second category – social games – apart from mentioning something called ‘concentric conversations’. I didn’t follow how this works, but there is more information on the Blackboard site.
It was difficult to get a sense of how these games might be used in teaching however. No doubt this was largely due to a necessary generalisation (there were lecturers from across the University taking part), but the online tools demonstrated do seem to lend themselves to quantitative rather than qualitative or critical approaches to knowledge. We might entertain first years with crosswords (1 across: what is the plural of ‘medium’), and some of the resources will be useful to me in teaching interactive media (i.e. teaching students to think about and make games, rather than using games to teach per se) but most of these games would be, I suspect, rather a distraction for the teaching of humanities subjects. This may well be a failure of imagination on my part of course.
