Thank goodness I “GET” Twitter. Thank goodness I have a great group of people that I follow and vice versa in Twitter. CoolCatTeacher, aka Vicki Davis, shared this tweet earlier tonight. It had two of my favorite words in it: gaming and education….and not in any particular order of fondness mind you. There is a free subscription to the Innovate: Journal of Online Education you will need to complete to read the article. Also looking at some of the other article titles, it might not be a bad journal to subscribe to. The article Vicki shared is: “Leveraging Identity to Make Learning Fun:
Possible Selves and Experiential Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)” Or commonly what I like to call in educational gaming, MMOEGs

Here are some of the highlights that I liked:

• “Educational games frequently consist of repetitive, superficial tasks with limited transfer or poorly disguised attempts to sugar coat learning, which can leave the student feeling patronized or deceived.”
  • This is the skill and drill mentality that most administrators LOVE because, well I’m not really sure. I guess it looks like the students are engaged in learning…but really just repeating the same tasks over and over again.
• “MMOGs are rich, pervasive 3D virtual worlds with thousands of participants rendered in real time. The interface allows participants to create and experiment with a second life, experiencing an alternate reality that includes aspects of possible selves, regardless of who one is offline. In a virtual world, people can reinvent themselves to become better, worse, or altogether different from their real-world identities. A normally shy player can become someone with a more attractive physique or a more confident personality. Alternatively, a player can choose to have an ugly physique or to adopt a brash, obnoxious personality. He or she may even change gender, age, or ethnicity, or take the opportunity to investigate seemingly impossible options; for example, a disabled person may have an avatar that can walk or fly. Because the virtual world is free of most of the constraints of the offline world, players can communicate, behave, appear, and be differently in an MMOG.”
  • This is one of the most endearing qualities to MMORPGs that I love. The game continues on, even if I’m not logged in. For example, this is an image taken in Ultima Online. To make a long story short, these images of my house in UO. When I’m not logged in, the house is still there, all of the contents are still there…and other PC’s can come by my house to check it out.Many of my friends that play take on thoroughly different personalities as their normal persona. Males playing females and vice versa. I’ve never really looked at the gaming as a way to discover one’s self as in this article suggests, but I can truly see the rationale in doing the study in this manner.
• “Were MMOGs able to sustain engagement and motivation as teaching tools? At the end of the five-week course, students were highly enthusiastic about using MMOGs in general, calling them “fun, engaging . . . amazing learning tools” with “the potential to teach many things.”
  • I’ve reported ad nauseum about my heydays of online gaming in Everquest and World of Warcraft. I could literally spend 16 hours glued to my monitor screen as 1 person in a 40 or 100 person raiding experience; or simply doing mundane tasks as pulling MOBS for my group. I know this is not a selling factor to bring gaming into education, but it shows how engaging and fun games can be. When it ceases to be fun, that’s when games start to see their attrition rates having a marked increase.
• “Merely applying a superficial sugar coating of game-like activities to educational tasks like the repetitive math tasks found in games like Math Blaster or Number Munchers is not motivating or engaging in the long run, since students may quickly lose interest due to unmet relevance needs (Squire and Jenkins 2004). In contrast, MMOGs promote learning by motivating and engaging students through the direct leverage of identity enactment and role play; that is, they deeply recruit an individual’s identity while taking on the identity of a character in a game. This identity adoption process trains students to solve problems from the point of view of the roles they are assuming, opening them up to new perspectives and challenging them to think in new ways.”
  • More skill and drill mumbo jumbo in my eyes. There was a game being demonstrated at NECC back at the end of Jun. I was too busy engaged in conversations at the Blogger’s Cafe to pay much mind to it. However, from the sounds that I could hear, the game sounded ‘cool’. That’s the fundamental key to any ‘game’ that is introduced as a learning tool to our students. It has to be cool. Number Munchers and Thinking Things just don’t cut it in the eyes of our kids.
    

Faculties and Parents would never allow such games as World of Warcraft or Halo, etc into the classroom setting. There’s some developer out there that has a concept that will make all the difference. I just hope that it will come sooner than later. Compass Odyssey and FCAT Explorer just doesn’t cut it in my eyes. Something along the lines of Dungeon Siege or even Diablo (both 1 and 2) is certainly viable as well.

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages…

Tom.

Technorati Tags: coolcatteacher MMOG MMOEG MMORPG edugaming education technology edtech

Source: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Lee, J., and C. Hoadley. 2007. Leveraging identity to make learning fun: Possible selves and experiential learning in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Innovate 3 (6). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=348 (accessed August 6, 2007). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.