Play Games - Save the World

I've just watched an awe-inspiring TED video by Jane McGonigal called Saving the world through game dynamics.

Please watch it. Do you think she's really onto something? I'll try and explain why I do. And how we can get everyone on board for this - in the real world.

I'm already signed up to Urgent Evoke, the latest game Jane talks about in the video, but have revisited it this morning to start on my first mission. It's straight into some serious stuff - Secrets of Social Innovation. My mission is to pick one that speaks to me, so I have chosen:

Listen to the right people. Okay, so you probably don’t know what it’s like to carry fifty pounds of firewood on your head. Well, don’t pretend that you do. Talk to someone who has done it. I believe that the key to innovation in international development is truly understanding the problem, and using your imagination is not good enough.

It reminds me of the BBC program I watched a few weeks ago challenging the attitude that "every one could get a job if they actually wanted one and stopped being lazy". It just isn't true, but I kind of thought that it was, because I didn't know the facts. I've never been there. I don't know the solution, but I am at least better informed about the problem.

Yesterday I blogged about Lucy Bradshaw who produces Simulation games at Electronic Arts. Simulation games are another great way of understanding the world and thinking through problems. Making hard choices - education or roads, environment or expensive waste removal..?

So now I'm armed with the skills to explore the issues in a game, I know I need to learn about the real problems by connecting with real people who understand them, and I will try my best to believe that anything is possible. And I have another trick - which I hope is the key to getting more people on board with this, Leaderboards.

The possibilities thrill me. My early explorations of this - using games and leaderboards to educate show potential, but I'm sure this can be taken so much further. I'm sure the likes of Jane and her team will be able to create better and smarter games, but I think the real art will be in recognising and harvesting the ideas that come out of the games and figuring out how to apply them in the real world. Would be a shame if a kid posted the solution to poverty but nobody picked up on it.

My Favourite Game (Ada Lovelace Day 2010)

Last year for Ada lovelace day, I wrote about Marissa Meyer, Google's Vice President, Search Products and User Experience. This year I thought I'd fine another woman high up in a company I love - Apple. But I was to be disappointed, there are no female executives at Apple. There is one on the Board of Directors - Andrea Jung, but her role seems more Business than Tech (so sorry Andrea, you don't count for Ada Lovelace). So what are my other loves ? Let's talk games...

For me, the best kind of games are simulations. Sim City in it's various versions has consumed months of my life. I have worried about whether my citizens would have enough water, and whether they'd mind if I sacrificed their beloved roads in favour of a decent education for their children. In fact, despite not having played it for years I would still classify it as "my favourite game" because it was so influential on me.

I was delighted to discover that the producer behind the latest versions of Sim City, and the Sims and SPORE (a entire life modeller) is a woman. So this year for Ada Lovelace Day I have chosen Lucy Bradshaw, Executive Producer at Electronic Arts.


Here's her summary biog (2008) from 50 Top Women in Technology

"When people say “Get a life” these days, they may be talking about a virtual version—most notably the video games that enable you to simulate your own societies and your own virtual persons to populate them. Charged with developing a sequel to the most popular digital dollhouse for adults, Bradshaw knocked the pixelated ball out of the park: The Sims 2, on which she was executive producer, was one of the top-selling PC games of 2005 and 2006. She has also watched over the releases of SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4. The series continues to be among the industry’s most lucrative franchises, with the Sim titles alone accounting for more than $1 billion in sales. Bradshaw worked for Activision and LucasArts before joining Maxis after it was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997. These days she’s teamed up with Sims creator Will Wright on Spore, an epic game modeled on the evolution of life. —BAP"

An interview with EA Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw on the making of Spore

In honour of Lucy, and Ada Lovelace, I downloaded SPORE for my iPhone last night and spent a while helping my little blog evolve in the primordial ooze.

Well done Lucy, not only for the great games that you help produce, but for being a glamourous women high up in your male-dominated profession.

Tell me a story

I've signed up for a University of Brighton workshop in May called "Learning Through Stories" which is going to:

"explore the idea of enhancing learning through stories, story development by educators and or fellow learners, the construction of stories to convey a set of learning objectives, the conversion of planned, emergent or experiential learning into stories to help others learn and, the translation of learning from stories from one domain to another, and more."

I've offered a session on game-based-learning and how narrative can be used in games to increase engagement. I want to feature some local examples as well as some I'm aware of from colleagues externally.

I thought I'd post mini-summaries here of what I've got in mind for my bit and would appreciate any additions you may have to this list - comment below or email me if you prefer - thanks!

Introduction to ARGs in Education (Alternate Reality Games)
"a format which blurs the line between reality and fiction, game and real life, online and offline, creating an immersive experience for its participants."

diagram from Nicola Whitton, Argosi

more information: ARGOSI introduction, Viewfinder article by Alex Moseley (pdf)

ARGOSI
Manchester Metropolitan University
ARGOSI was an alternate reality game with an "ongoing story that runs throughout the game provided coherence and context to the challenges, and the game community provided a forum for students to share information, provide hints for each other and work together. As well as the universal induction aims of encouraging students to make new friends and get to know the city, in this pilot the focus was on a single area of the induction curriculum: introductory library and information skills."

more information: ARGOSI website

Who is Herring Hale? (Alternate Reality Game)
University of Brighton - 2006
A pilot project to investigate the use of game formats to introduce support information and services, primarily to first years:
• An online and offline treasure-hunt game
• Fun, intriguing and engaging
• Optional for all students
• Develops key IT and social skills
• Encourages awareness of support services
• 1 (30 minute) clue per week over the term

more information: Overview blog post

What is GG? (Alternate Reality Game)
University of Brighton - 2007
The next implementation of ARG building on lessons learned from "Who is Herring Hale?"

The Great History Conundrum
University of Leicester - 2008
"Responding to a need within a first-year undergraduate History module to improve take-up and engagement by students of the critical analysis and filtering of internet-based historical resources, the innovative Great History Conundrum project used paradigms from online social networks and immersive online alternative reality games to create a four-week long activity based in problem solving, collaboration and competitive play. Through the solution of a number of puzzles of varying difficulty, high level searching, filtering and criticism skills were taught. Collaboration and reflection were encouraged through the use of discussion forums and the construction of a collective wiki (a resource the students will be able to use throughout the rest of their degree) , and carefully constructed assessment criteria encouraged and assessed engagement with the activity and concepts. The activity additionally served to develop a community of practice early in the undergraduate course, hence improving engagement and performance in the wider academic context."

more information: ALT-C abstract, Overview blog post

World of Warcraft Grading
Indiana University 2009
"Last year, Sheldon replaced the traditional grading system in two of his game design classes with a system that is based on experience points (XP), which were typically used to track progress in role-playing games. Students commenced the program as avatars at level one, which corresponded to zero XP and a grade of ‘F’. They gained XP by completing ‘quests’, ‘fighting monsters’ and ‘crafting’– in other words, giving presentations, sitting quizzes and exams, and handing in projects."

more information: Overview blog post

Twitter - is it really only for the web geeks?

* note, in this post I'm only interested in Twitter as a communication tool, I know lots of people like Twitter for following celebs, which is fine, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

I had a placement student to amuse for a few hours yesterday, so I set him the tasks of doing some analysis of way the University of Brighton uses Twitter. Interesting results.

I had already identified 60 twitter accounts belonging to University of Brighton staff or services - and I think this is a relatively complete list. There are of course no doubt many more accounts belonging to our students and possibly our staff, but for this analysis I'm sticking to the ones that use real names and admit to the affiliation(!)

So, of the 60 accounts:

• 10 are functional (related to services like the SU newspaper) and 50 are personal
• 26 belong to Information Services, 13 to the Students' Union, 11 to the academic schools
  
• 14 have tweeted within 24 hours, 24 haven't tweeted for over a month and 3 have never tweeted.

What do I make of this? Well I suppose it isn't surprising that a lot of individuals who work in Information Services have personal twitter accounts - but what I'm interested in is how many of them have continued as active users of the service. ie for whom, and where does Twitter work well?

So of the 26 Information Services accounts, 17 have tweeted within the last month. That's pretty high I think.

I'm giving a session at our Summer Learning & Teaching conference entitled "Twitter - Build your Personal Research Network" and the point I want to make there is the importance of building a network, otherwise, like all social networks, it's all a bit silent and pointless.

I believe that only if you invest the time in building and maintaining your network (the usual advice, be interesting, join in, share, reply, retweet) that you can reap the benefits of tools like Twitter.

Information Services professionals are probably well placed to understand and make use of Twitter. But I'd like to help those without such high exposure to the tools to take advantage of them too - where it's appropriate. Sometimes it feels like Twitter is just full of technophiles/learning technologists and web geeks...and maybe if you're into molecular biology building a useful network isn't possible. I don't know. Are there any molecular biologists out there looking for company?

If any of you have any great examples of subject specific Twitter usage (and no IT/Education or related subjects allowed) then I'd love to hear them.

Wheels, wheels and yet more wheels...(and voting)

I was reminded this week of the fact that so often developers in HE (like myself) seem to spend their time reinventing wheels - developing things for our systems that have most likely also been developed in many other similar institutions. Particularly when it comes to Blackboard Building Blocks integrating with common systems, chances are it's been done before!

There are formal channels for sharing things like this - I could check and publish my work on the Blackboard Building Blocks site, and I can use my contacts (on Twitter or via conferences) to see who is working on similar stuff. But in fact there's very little incentive to do this, usually it's quicker - depending on the task of course - to just ask Google or code it up yourself.

So in a spirit of code sharing, and the expectation that Google will help interested parties find this, I present my Blackboard Building Block banner rotation for doing secure voting with the 'BAM' website, in this case for this weeks Student Union elections. (Incidentally, I tweeted this on Monday and received quite a lot of interest, so particularly think our experiences are worth sharing in this rather verbose way!).
--

You can download the Building Block here
http://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/file/kh32/read/1036754/blackboard-building-block-su-voting-and-rotating-banner

Fundamentally, it passes the username of the logged in Blackboard user and an MD5 hashed version of it to the SU site which then does single sign on and allows them to vote.

You'll need to unzip and make some changes to the view.jsp file (like the URL of your SU site, the path to your favourite graphic and put in the hashkey agreed with BAM for your site), but this is how it works for us.

Once the building block is installed and you're ready to go live with the banner, set it as the Header on your Home tab:

Ours now looks like this. The file supports rotating banners - you can define one (as in this case) or as many as you like, all with their own click-through URLs. They rotate every 5 seconds.


When clicked the students are taken through - and automatically logged in - to the SU site on the voting page ready to go.


Our SU site is hosted by BAM who agree the hashkey with me and take care of the elections

I hope that's enough info to get anyone started who wants to do this - please use the comments or contact me if you have any questions - or if you intend to use this! There are a few issues to be ironed out still and I can't promise to remember to post them here...

Filter and Assimilate 2: The Battle of the Sexes

Last month I wrote a post called Filter and Assimilate highlighting the different way a colleague and I gather and share information. I've had several conversations on the topic since then, and it seems to me there are two basic types of information sharers in the world - for no particular reason, lets call them 'Boys' and 'Girls'. I offer you my model as a massive sweeping generalisation and welcome your feedback!

So Boys first, in my diagram the boy is the "I" and the rectangle represents everything they know. They pass on to me only the information they think I need to know. I didn't get overloaded with anything I didn't need to know. But the red area highlights the problem - these are the things I need to know that the boy didn't know I needed to know. This is bad:Now Girls. In my model, the girl passes on everything they know to me. Everything! There's loads of stuff, most of which isn't at all interesting, but most importantly she did manage to pass on everything I needed to know from her. Nothing missing. Fantastic:
Now the second model suits me as the recipient, because I can filter all the stuff and pick out the bits I'm interested in. It has been suggested to me by a colleague that this model doesn't suit men though...he says:

"Being without the built-in multi-tasking skills of the female, the male also has difficulty in dealing with a vast flow of diverse information, each piece of which (he naturally assumes) should be equally valuable"

I've also heard of some research (pending reference, it was via a tweet!) that women are "better at being social". I find it hard to get a feel for how true this is, I know men who do share and I know women who don't. And nearly everyone I know will share if I ask them to, as long as I know what to ask...

I've been thinking about this in line with Robin Bishop's post on unknown unknowns. If you don't know what the questions you need to ask are, you can't get the information. This problem is solved if everyone shares everything they know. Which brings me back to my first post - if we were all highly skilled at filtering and assimilating the massive broadcast of information this would produce, then nobody would walk around not knowing the vital piece of information they didn't know they didn't know. If you know what I mean.