>> So I just want to welcome
everybody to the Virtual Center
for Archives & Record Administration.
My name is Matt Carmichael I am Dr. Franks
assistant here in VCARA and I just want
to welcome everybody here
today this is a great turn out.
And I just wanted to first of all introduce
our guest speaker here today, Diane Nahl,
who is professor in the Department of
Information Computer Sciences the Library
and Information Sciences Program and her
research focuses on the roll of effects
and emotions in socio-technical
learning environments including the web
and virtual worlds.
And so without further ado I'm going
to sit down and let Diana speak.
>> Thank you so much Matt and thank you Pat
and Lori for inviting me to come and talk
at San Jose State University the SLIS school.
It's really a pleasure to be here I'm
really happy and I love this topic.
It's something that I've
gotten into fairly recently
and I think it's just a very interesting
topic and of course I wouldn't have even known
about it if I hadn't come into Second Life in
2008 because I kept reading that librarians were
in this thing called Second Life and why I won't
go into my tortured way of figuring out how
to do it, but I've been here since then and
try to involve my students in various courses
in using Second Life as an environment.
Lori was one of the first people that I
met and she's had a huge influence on me
and I'm really -- it's really a pleasure to
be here in an environment again with you Lori.
So let me get started.
This is about Gamification and
University courses and just
to give a brief overview it involves --
Gamification involves applying some of
the elements that are used in game design
to educational content and to
information problem solving in order
to increase student involvement with course
concepts and to enhance learning and retention.
In this presentation I'm going to describe how
four essential elements that are found in games
and how four affected skill areas that
are adherent in computer games were mapped
to the content in eight different
University courses.
These were taught in either hybrid or online
modes and the activities were designed
to interest students in tapping these
skills that I will cover a little bit later.
We did analysis of structure self reports
written by the students, lab reports, chat logs,
and their thread of discussions that generated
illustrations from various assignments
that were addressing our gamified aspect so I'll
give you a couple of examples of that later.
These selected Gamification strategies we've
used have evolved over a four year period
in response to the students and they
continue to be developed to be incorporated
and to be evaluated for their potential
to influence learning and we have
to keep adding new ones all the time.
This presentation is going to begin with
a broad overview of the spread of games
and Gamification including some definitions,
a lot of resources, and significant people.
The note card that you received has the text of
this talk in it and it has all the references
and all the links so you can get to
the things that are being discussed.
So let me begin with something that I
always find astounding which is the charts
from KZero Worldswide and this is a European
Company that tracks the virtual world industry,
the game industry, especially
with regard to virtual worlds.
And so they track when worlds come into
existence their dates you can see in the chart
across the top line and the side line it
gives the date when the game was initiated
and then it shows the growth
of the accounts in that game.
And you can see this is age 10
through age 15 and the larger the dot
of course the greater number of accounts so Club
Penguin is really big there and Stardoll too,
but all of these are over -- have over a million
accounts and it's just phenomenal to see this
and I am fortunate that I have grandchildren
who are ages 7 and 9 and there's a part
of this KZero chart covers that age
group too but I look at this age group
because they're the ones that are closer to
coming into the environment where I exist
in college for example and I see that we
have to change the way we do education
because of this phenomenon of millions
and millions of kids playing games.
And if we look at the older age group it's
also there's a lot of development there
but not as much as that younger age group.
So from age 15 to 20 there are fewer
games that have over a million accounts,
but Habbo Hotel the largest one there
is right on the line for 15 year olds
so younger kids can play that
too and as well as older people.
So it's just fascinating to see this development
and also to know that the statistics that are
out there and what people spend on games in the
United States and worldwide vary quite a bit,
but I think a conservative one
that I found is that in the U.S.
in 2012 there were 167 million players
and they spent 14.8 billion
dollars on the games that they play.
And this is even given the case that many
games are free like Second Life for example,
and lots of aps are free as well
and kids are playing everything.
My grandchildren play like a new game every week
and a half or so they say, we got a new one,
you've got to download it, it's free,
because they know I won't spend money all
those kinds of aps I'd go broke if I did.
So and then they introduce me to it and
the latest one is Samurai Vs Zombies,
they're very enamored with that one
and also Hay Day a farming game.
So I play these games with them because
I was never a gamer and I really need
to learn what motivates people and what
is fun about that kind of environment.
So it started in 2008 when I came to Second
Life and immediately I felt the fun it was just
like a sort of injection just
from the environment itself.
So millions of tweens and teens are already
playing a lot of social video games.
If you have questions as I go
along you can answer them in chat
and if somebody could answer
[inaudible] I would appreciate it.
All right.
So my next slide is about the
research on games for education.
The goal of this research is to see if
they do increase the student engagement
with course content and some of the findings
are that [pause] I'm sorry I was reading.
Some of the findings here have to do with
what makes games effective for learning
and one of the things that's really
important is the level of interactivity
of the learners the more the
interactivity the better.
That's one of the problems that students
have with Second Life when they land
in it they expect it to be a game but instead
it's an environment that looks like a game
and you could play games with it or in
it but it's not obvious to the person
who just lands there how to go about doing that
so that's always been a challenge and educators
who use Second Life have to set up their
environments to immediately engage people.
And another point is that they're effective in
improving student participation and performance
by providing frequent feedback so there has to
be this constant feedback so that people feel
like something is happening and
they're getting something done.
And thirdly role playing in immersive
environments has been found to enhance the sense
of reality to just due to the
setting and the dramatic characters
and the ability to take somebody's perspective.
So there are different kinds of games
categories of games and here's a little bit
of the definition that you'll find repeated
everywhere when you search for this to find
out what is the definition of Gamification.
So they point out that it's the use of a
non game context with game elements applied
and that can be applied to,
you know, a very high degree
or a very minimal degree there's lots of
different variety in the way that that's done.
[] I will tell you later in this talk what
I've done and what I intend to keep doing,
but one of the main points
throughout all of this research
and all of these definitions is
that fun is a required element.
Beyond the systematic elements and any other
kinds of things that you must cover it has
to be fun and that is probably
one of the most difficult things
to manage; how do you make things fun.
I don't claim to have the answer to
that but I have attempts that I've made
and I'll tell you how that worked out.
So a lot of games are created just for fun,
just for entertainment, things like Minecraft,
you know, building is fun, now my grandchildren
love Minecraft they got all this kind of stuff
that they've built, Hay Day which is a
farming game like FarmVille, decorating
and arranging your farm is fun and they
really vary if you look across the farms.
Angry Birds, becoming skillful is fun,
learning the trajectories, you know,
knocking down a whole bunch of things because
you're really good at doing that that's fun.
Samurai Vs Zombies winning is fun, you
know, getting rid of all the zombies as fast
as possible and picking up the prizes along
the way for doing that that's all fun.
But they do learn skill in the process
of playing just fun games however there's
a whole category called serious games
and those includes game for work such as the
nursing training that goes on in Second Life
and Lori Lie is pregnant today
because she's working on --
she just told us that she's working on
the nursing training and she's going
through this process to see if the professor
wants to include that kind of [laughter] yeah
that kind of simulation and role
play for the nursing students.
So that's a serious game that's
conducted in Second Life all the time.
But there's a lot of serious
games like DrivingSimulator a lot
of states require people use a Driving
Simulator basically a video game
to get their driver license.
You have to keep the car on the
road and not break any of the rules.
And then of course the military video games
that are for flight and combat training
so forth even the ones that people like to
play who aren't in the military like Call
of Duty can be considered a serious game.
And then there's a whole category of
serious games with pro social purposes
such as helping people to change
their sustainability behavior.
We have one at the UH of University
of Hawaii campus that's running
in the dorms called the Kukui Cup and the
students get points for doing all sorts of thing
like turning off the lights and not letting the
water run while they're brushing their teeth
and things like that.
So it engages them in becoming more
ecologically aware and changing their behavior.
And others help people to improve their
health and longevity like the Wii or Xbox
and there's a journal called Games for Heath and
it's a really excellent journal that encourages
and helps to develop healthy lifestyle
habits through behavior modification
and self management of illness and
chronic conditions and by motivating
and supporting physical activity or games
that help kids get their household
chores done like Chore Wars.
We tried that for a while and the kids liked it
but they kind of didn't like it after a while.
So we have to keep constantly
changing things in this environment.
And of course there are many games
used in education in Second Life,
there are the language learning games
that are played that are really good
and then there are web games for developing
math skills and there are [inaudible] games
like Scribblenauts these are aps and
citation skills games like Biblionauts
that was developed by an LIS professor grant.
And Val's asking about the course
Gamification MOOC that's in progress now,
I'm in that with Val and
a couple of other people
that I know [inaudible] is
in that one too, okay.
So it's really fascinating
and I'm learning a lot.
In fact, that's my next slide is the
picture of the professor, Dr. Kevin Werbach,
and he is a legal studies professor at
The Wharton School at the University
of Pennsylvania it says there and we're in
the third week of the MOOC on Gamification.
He just spoke yesterday at the GSummit the Game
Summit 2013 in San Francisco and he's really
on top of it from the business point of view.
So this is a business trend a huge
business trend and you might have noticed
that television programs, sports teams, they
all have games now that you can get in aps
and so forth in iPhones and tablets and so on.
And so one of Werbach points that I've
taken from this so far is that you need
to see the students, in my
case it's students, as players.
You view them as players not students and
that's how you can get a different perspective
on learners that will allow you to make
changes to increase engagement to see
where the fun can be brought in
in conjunction with the content.
And it might not just be fun it might
be excitement or even some kinds
of disturbing challenging feelings if you get
people into scenarios where they have to --
it's like a moral dilemma that they have
to experience and try to come out of.
So fun is really important
because it keeps people coming back
but these other challenging environments
and situations also increase engagement
and are really important for learning.
Yeah, it's great to see everybody
here thank you so much for coming
and I'm really appreciative of
Lori and Pat for inviting me.
I really enjoy putting this together to try
to pull together all the things I've been
skipping around trying to figure out.
Yes, role playing is significant, very
significant, and I'll give some examples later
in the presentation of how
we use that in our courses.
So Gamification for education when you look
into it besides looking at the learners
as players Carl Cap has done a lot of
research on gaming and education and he likes
to emphasize these four areas;
the freedom to fail,
in traditional learning environments
most learners do whatever's necessary
to avoid failing failure is not
a goal, but if you have a freedom
to fail perspective it encourages learners
to take some chances to use trial and error
to explore and use discovery techniques and this
allows them to make multiple attempts at things
to see the different effects of certain
decisions in order to obtain mastery.
So it really emphasizes the trial
and error approach to learning
and people actually enjoy that, they like to
think how something might work out and try
and if it doesn't work they can try another
thing and so forth sometimes managing
that can be a challenge too for
the professor, but the perspective,
freedom to fail is a really interesting one.
He also encourages instructors to examine
their materials and their activities to try
to design an interesting beginning, a
compelling middle, and an exciting ending
so that you can develop a flow of interest.
And so it's like fiction the pattern
that fiction takes or the pattern
that drama takes it has to have that
flow and not just all be one note.
And then he talks about storytelling
and he gives the example of case studies
with narratives and dramatic elements can
be very immersive and give learners roles
and scenarios by having them work together to
in act a scenario and come to conclusions on how
to proceed through the role interactions.
And I'll give some examples later how we found
that role play is a very powerful learning tool
and it comes quite naturally to students.
And his final point is one that we've seen
before about frequent and targeted feedback
that learning is more effective when that is
integrated instead of having people, you know,
start an assignment and then
weeks later they turn it in
and then finally they get a grade that's not
the kind of feedback that he's talking about.
Okay. Another person that I think is
important in the area of Gamification
for education is Dr. Scott Nicholson from
Syracuse University and he is very interesting
because he started looking at libraries
and what they do with game programming.
So he's looked at that he's also taught a course
on games and libraries on YouTube which is free
and he published a book on gaming activities
and libraries and he's now doing research
on Gamification which means, you know,
applying it to the educational context.
And he's got a great website called Because
Play Matters which is in the note card
and it's really great place to go.
He's somebody whose been working
on this for a few years now
and has made it his major focus
so I recommend his work highly.
[ Pause ]
A special area of information literacy
we should pay attention to right here
because information literacy is something that
both school and academic librarians spend lot
of time in formal development and teaching.
Public librarians are also involved
with information literacy
whether it's formal or informal.
A lot of actually IL information literacy games
have been created that can be incorporated
into instruction and there's a bunch more listed
on the note card that these are a few of them
and they all have different premise
and do different things some are
simple some are complex not listed
on this slide is the New York Public
Library's overnight scavenger hunt
where they had people spend the night one night
and then they created an ap and an online game
for people to use with an iPhone
when they come into the library
or they can use the online
game and create an Avatar.
And so these players write stories about the
artifacts that they find and they learn a lot
about them along the way and then
the stories are posted on their site
and their site claims millions
of stories have been posted.
So it's really a fascinating
development how people really took
to that game they called it Find the Future.
And there's another place
called Lycoming College
and there's a professor there
who studies and creates games.
So I've also listed there plagiarism game
called Find the Goblins in which, you know,
it includes a storytelling aspect so you're
given the role of finding the goblins
and when you find one by
clicking around you're hiding.
You get a multiple choice question
about what you can do with a source
and if you answer it correctly then you
get the points for that and so forth
and you can save the day in the end.
So it's trying to make plagiarism
more exciting for students
and make them really want
to pay attention to it.
So I'm not going into information literacy
games particularly here but there's also a book
that has come out called -- oh, yes, well it's
on the list under the information literacy games
but it has 60 games for information
literacy, it's an edited book so a variety
of librarians have contributed to it.
Maybe, JJ, I'm not familiar with his name
there, but it's probably true if you say so.
Okay. So the next thing I want to
start to cover is Jane McGonigal.
She's the person who has been most inspirational
to me probably because I came across her first
but also because she's a serious games designer
and her TED Talk has had nearly 3 million views
and its title, Gaming can make a better world,
and then she has a second one that has to do
with the health called, SuperBetter.
And her book called, Reality is Broken, is a
New York Times best seller which is very unusual
for an academic book and it's
used in courses; came out 2011.
Her book Reality is Broken really inspired the
work that I started at University of Hawaii
in my courses to gamify my course.
She is not just an inspirational speaker but
an excellent writer and she has been reported
to say that she doesn't like the word
Gamification she thinks it's to commercial
and too much oriented toward the business
world and where she's trying to do things
that help people improve life for
themselves and for everyone else
so she doesn't appear to
be using that word at all.
But that didn't stop me from incorporating
what she brought to light for me.
So the first thing that she talks about
are the four essential game elements
and these elements are also provided in many
books on how to build games and so forth.
So it's sort of boiling down what
is a game to these four elements,
which when you read these it doesn't sound
too exciting at all, but of course the goal
or the outcome and the rules that let
you achieve the outcome and feedback
on how close you are, you know, am
I there yet, am I going to make it,
and then the idea of voluntary
participation or autonomy.
So we applied these to some degree
in various ways in several courses.
In our UH Minoa courses of course
traditionally lecture, demonstration,
and classroom activities were staples
before 2008 when I came to Second Life.
But after reading about increased
student involvement in game
like virtual learning environments we decided to
look at virtual world platforms for education.
And to see how ludic methods as they can
be called in the academic world apply
to course content promise to enliven and
animate concepts within an environment
that could be created to appear and
function according to any specification.
So the courses that we gamified were eight
courses over four years including now and it's
over 600 students have been
through these courses so far.
They were offered at least twice
in different semesters and four
of them have been offered every semester, they
include, undergraduate psychology courses,
and graduate Library and Information
Science courses those are mine.
The graduate psychology courses
are doctor [inaudible].
Web and the virtual world platform Second
Life were used in all of these courses
for the purposes of attending
preannounced events or class sessions,
for making observations of some in world or
online activity, for working in project teams,
and finding objects and information
for assignments as well as designing
and building interactive exhibits
and presenting results of their work
to the class and to specific audiences.
Games always have a goal as
was pointed out by McGonigal
and many others or a series of outcome.
And the courses have goals
embedded within assignments
and due dates if you look at it as goals.
There are several goals to accomplish
for an entire course for example
and within a given assignment
there are sub goals
that represent component parts of the whole.
Even group assignments can have points for
component parts; for the parts written jointly,
for the parts written individually,
however winning points alone is not
sufficient to gamify assignments.
So to encourage cooperation, creativity
and commitment we developed team project
assignments extending over several weeks
that included emerging, embedding, joint
research planning for a deadline, and active
and written production to an audience.
The teams kept records of their progress
with collaborative Google spreadsheets
and Google documents and the
instructors use the comment functions
to answer questions provide information and
give suggestions right in the documents.
So we were inside their documents
which the students had surprised reactions
to, like, oh the professor is here.
Sometimes they would like skip out when
they saw my icon up there on the document,
but anyway they got used to
it and came to appreciate it.
The rules then of course can exist
at the macro and micro levels
for the purposes of Gamification.
The micro rules and the limitations on methods
were developed for particular assignments,
for instance, students form their own teams
using a collaborative spreadsheet with the names
and the profile of the others
students and the times --
they had to fill in the times they're available
to meet online in two hour periods and based
on those availability times, the teams
composed themselves with people that could meet
at the same times that they could meet.
Each team consisted of four students and
the students are responsible for setting up
and scheduling four different teams over the
semester so they changed every four weeks,
every three to four weeks they changed teams.
And when they're in teams they performed
these prescribed weekly activities
such as joint research, and immersive
environment activities or role plays.
After the activity each student will then post
an individual lab report describing the activity
in detail including the time of the meeting
and who was present so they're documenting it
like archivally and students are required also
to read and reply to each other's lab reports
and site each other in their responses.
So that's getting them to notice and claim
responsibility for the words of others.
These detailed procedures have been
developed over several terms to allow students
to take responsibility for their learning to
be innovative and responsive to each other
and to actively join the community as
well as build the community by choosing
and negotiating teams and
times on their own initiative.
Okay. TR has a question about failure: Does it
have unfortunate side effects on motivation?
And of course it could have
unfortunate side effects on motivation
because people don't like to fail.
I've had that experience even in a game
that's not on a computer but at a workshop
at Low Ex [phonetic] one year we
were in these teams and we had
to do this exercise called peddles around the
rose and our team our table couldn't solve it
and we were dejected I have to say.
We really did feel unintelligent
among our peers.
So, yes, there is something like that, but,
you know, having the attitude that it's okay
to fail brings out different behavior in
students and it frees them from constraints
that they normally put on themselves
so it's good to experiment with that
and see what effect it can have on motivation.
So the third one is feedback and in courses
that often corresponds to
grading done after the fact.
In these courses the points system are
cumulative over the term and students keep track
of their own records both online
and they're shared with instructors.
So the points gained are by completing
activities according to specifications
and the points lost have to do with failing
to meet deadlines and length requirements
and for missing assignments but these can
be made up so there's a fail safe there too.
When students keep records of their own
accomplishments they then become more involved
in monitoring their cumulative
performance so that they try
to improve their record as the term proceeds.
Instructor comments on the collaborative
documents are also formative feedback
on their progress and guidance
on what needs to be done.
Students can reply to the instructors
in the documents and ask questions.
So instead of being passive recipients of grades
they become active managers of performances
and this approach affords the students a
formative perspective on their learning overtime
as well as a summative perspective
at the end which they're used to,
their grades thus become
self-directed achievements.
And the final point about voluntary
participation this occurs in a variety of ways
and at different levels in our courses.
Building in this kind of autonomy
can activate intrinsic motivation
where the work itself becomes the reward.
Each week the teams negotiate among the
choices of activities and choices also builds
into each component of an activity
including selecting topics, role characters,
content from research and readings
and other aspects so they really have
to construct everything so
they have a pool they can use.
Choices built into subject matter, methods and
measures or assessments where students design,
implement, and report data from pilot
studies in their research assignments.
Creativity is encouraged through autonomy and
students often comment that the work was fun,
enlightening, and confidence building.
Second Life provides this creative environment
that students enjoy for animating situations
and scenarios from course content such
as the accident reconstruction assignment
on this slide.
So the students are at the virtual driving
track there and they are putting the cars
in place according to a court case that
they read about that had the details
of the accident reconstruction and
they were able to put it together there
and put on a presentation based on that.
Okay. This next slide is what I consider
my greatest inspiration from McGonigal,
she calls it the four game powers.
And they're listed there the first
is urgent optimism or the ability
to continuously scan the environment
to discover the next quest to engage.
And the second is blissful productivity or the
ability to persevere in the face of challenge
by using feedback to check your progress just
keep working on it, just keep working on it.
And the third is social fabric or the ability
to feel that one belongs to a community
where each shares in the work and contributes
to the progress of the whole group.
And the fourth is a sense of epic
meaning or the ability to consider
and work toward larger purposes than the self
because big picture narratives
facilitate commitment and cooperation.
These four skills represent orientations
that can tap a personal drive to mastery
and to accomplish goals with others.
While we educators always strive to
spark intrinsic motivation in students
with compelling content and with active
learning methods engagement can remain elusive
and inconsistent, but by contrast game
and context intrinsic motivation
is both primary and continuous.
Therefore in recent years elements of games
have been introduced into college curricula
because of their promise of enabling this
continuous engagement to enhance learning
and there are a lot of references on the note
card to lead you to those kinds of studies.
So these four game powers
inspired us quite a lot in order
to create an architecture for the courses.
Though it's the instructional Gamification
architecture that we are using currently.
So the first is involving social
immersion affordances that are going
to provide a game environment
to stimulate urgent optimism.
And here we have used Adobe Connect video
conferencing but primarily Second Life
and as well as Instagram and Pinterest,
these social environments and also visual
and interesting environments have helped to make
this urgent optimism concept more obvious to us.
So for example on the previous slide I'm
going to go back again to the images here;
the one on the right is the bullion pool and
that's that know how island in Second Life.
Urgent optimism in the face of several failed
attempts was expressed as another strategy
to try, these were students in the information
literacy pedagogy class that I teach.
So one of them they were working in chat as a
team and while at the pool so one of them said,
it looks like there are four items that
match the or query and there are four of us
so if we each hold one item
in the circle it should work.
But this strategy also failed because someone
previously had taken one of the pool toys
so the interactive animation script
failed and we didn't know that,
but nevertheless before quitting
this team urgent optimism continued
through nine more attempts to
find a way to solve the query.
So it wasn't possible but they
kept trying and back to the point
about motivation flagging it did flag but only
after nine attempts and they finally gave up
and then I queried the designer to find out what
was going on and he figured out what happened
and put the toy back so we got it solved.
It took a little time, but urgent optimism was
really obvious in their chat and in the actions
of the Avatar so you can show it in
machinima a series of photographs.
The second part of the architecture task
collaboration accordance is to encourage,
perseverance and blissful productivity
and in that area we use Google documents,
Google presentations, JewMag [phonetic] a
free magazine creation tool and [inaudible]
and the picture here at the bottom
left is a role play team assignment
to research a road rage case
and put on a mock trial.
So in this case the students persevered through
complex intervening steps by negotiating
and team meetings and making progress toward
winning the case and finally putting it
on in this courtroom environment that we have
up on the Dr. Drivings virtual driving track.
So the one student wrote about this particular
assignment; this week's lab was very challenging
because of the pressure we
have on us to do our very best
and win the trial case we have coming up.
We have spent a few weeks preparing for this.
My part was very challenging because I had
the attorney and I had to be very flexible.
I have to work with my clients and use their
stories to make the best argument that I have.
But trying something like this I
thought it was very fun because when
in life do I ever get to play a lawyer.
So that was an example of the
task collaboration affordances
and how role play is involved
in using those tools.
[ Pause ]
The next one is evidence based affordances
to support a sense of epic meaning.
We had to figure out how can we
make epic meaning part of this --
part of teaching because in games it's really
pretty obvious when people get really excited
about an epic win or in the serious games
when they believe they've done good either
for themselves or for others
or for their community.
Role playing enables students to adopt
these different relationship strategies
in a marriage class for example.
And to see themselves as becoming
better partners, better people,
and better role models for their children.
A sense of epic meaning was expressed in terms
of the insights gained in role play assignments.
And we saw this throughout the
reports that we went through.
One student wrote, writing the
dialogues according to the other centered
and the self-centered models was enlightening.
I never realized how negative I am
whenever my partner asks a question,
how could I not see that, makes me wonder what
else I'm not aware of that I would change.
And in the virtual driving class students have
the driving psychology class they have the
opportunity to see themselves as heroes which
is epic by overcoming natural tendencies
to think terrible thoughts about other drivers
and drive aggressively that's very common I'm
sure none of you know anything about that,
but we find that a lot of people
have these experiences in driving.
So one student wrote I know for me personally
before I took this class I would get very
emotionally charged when
I got behind the meal --
the wheel rather, and although after having
taken this class, and having read the two books,
I feel like I'm more emotionally
intelligent when it comes to driving.
I feel like this class has helped
me immensely to develop that.
It was a very interesting class
because most of the people
in our group said that they felt the same way.
I thought that was really neat.
And we often saw many types of expressions like
this that the role play where students were able
to take the perspective of another
or a different professional role really had
a big impact on them and it made them look
at their own behavior in comparison and
served as almost a vicarious role modeling
so they could say I'm going to be more like
this and now I know how to go about doing it.
So the references are in the note card not on
the slide here and this picture by the way is
from one of the events that my students created
in the information literacy pedagogy class
where they held an information literacy panel
on web 2.0 approaches to information literacy
and had four invited speakers
and a very large audience
of librarians actually there were 40 people
there so it was one of the more exciting
and well attended events that my students got
to create and it may them feel very empowered
and confident and proud of what they had
done even though the content was all coming
from the experts the students really got a lot
of out of it [laughter] 2.1 okay thank you, TR.
I want to thank you [inaudible]
for your kind attention
and now we have time for questions and comments.
I may not have gotten everything
from the chat as I was talking.
But JJ said how loose can
the rules and guidelines be
and still motivate students to role play.
Well ours weren't really loose so we haven't
experimented with making things really flexible
in terms of those guidelines but
we could do that we just found
that students really appreciate having some
really specific role that they need to research
and a way to portray that role with each
other when they're in a team meeting, in chat,
and so forth plus the resources that they
use from the readings that support the way
that the role would be and enacted.
So I would suggest, you know,
playing around with
that flexibility to see what you can do with it.
Some students would be really amenable to it
some students who love creativity you know,
can do a lot with very little
sort of like the improv people
who are really good at doing improv.
Okay. Yes, we'll Second Life is a real
case in point there are so many communities
where elaborate role playing is continuous
and is not what I'm talking about which is
in a course that you take for a certain period
of weeks and then you're off either graduating
or you are going to another course
where nothing like that occurs,
so it's just really an isolated incident.
The courses that I'm doing
this in and that are done
in the psychology department the
students do not get an education
like that they just have this one experience
of this one course that is like that.
Hi, [inaudible] yes, many of the students
were asynchronous in online courses so, yes,
they are distance learners and we found that a
major key is that they have to be put together
in working teams online despite
the fact that they are asynchronous
so we created a Google spreadsheet where
they can put up their time availability
and they can create teams
based on people's availability.
So they have to do that every week, work with
one team for a month and then switch teams,
but that dynamic has been incredibly successful
because in online asynchronous classes,
you know, you can just be alone you can just
feel so alone if it wasn't for Val setting
up meet ups for the Gamification
MOOC that would be the feeling there
because it's really watching videos and
answering quizzes and writing short assignments
and then there is a forum where
you can talk to people socially
but I notice people don't really interact
they that much they just put their opinion
but they don't kind of relate to the
others person's opinion so it's not
as social as maybe some forums can be.
But without Val's meet ups there would be
really nobody to talk about what we're going
through in that online course every week.
[Laughter] you want to take one of my
courses, JJ, you're welcome any time.
I do if I don't teach mine online I allow
people to come in in a hybrid fashion
through Adobe Connect, but I do teach mine
synchronously whereas Dr. Drivings course are
all asynchronous.
Okay. So, yeah, Second Life I'm not
sure why they would be reluctant
to come in synchronously.
We haven't had problems with that because
they're able to get set up their own time
and they like to be able to
feel like they're together
of course they also use Google plus
hangouts so they can see each other
and so it might be a good idea to allow
them to use both kinds of environments
so they can see each other in real world
appearances as well as Second Life appearances
that might be the key to
overcoming their reluctance.
Oh, thank you, Val, thank
you so much for coming.
Was really good having you here
and thank you for the meet ups
and the collaboration and the MOOC.
Sure, [inaudible].
Oh, JJ, okay I'll send you something
as soon as I have it together.
We're just ending our term
now next week is our last --
our last sessions and classes so
it's kind of like all over with now
but we'll be restarting in August.
>> We appreciated having you here
it was an excellent presentation.
>> Thank you.
I don't claim to be an expert on Gamification by
any means but I've given you a lot of resources
to people who are so if you want to explore
it you can get into it through the note card.
>> I will certainly do that.
>> Thank you, Professor Dan, I appreciate it.
Thank you [inaudible] Damian,
thank you [inaudible].
Oh, this is a fabulous group it's just amazing.
Really attractive good sized
audience, thank you, Linus, oh Snow,
thank you for coming, long time no see.
>> Thank you, Diana, it was
a wonderful presentation.
[ Pause ]
