I’ve managed to get to a few webinar sessions recently where people have been talking about ‘game based learning’. I’ve had even more emails from teachers about it – where to start, what to use etc., and it seems the winds of change in ‘edutopia’ are increasingly blowing in favour of using digital games in the classroom.
I’ll gloss over the soap-box, suffice to say there is – and has been – a wealth of evidence that adopting ‘gameful’ learning with technology has benefits in blended learning. Having said that, developing sound pedagogical design around any game is not as simple as it may first appear.
Yes games develop pretty much all the 21C skills we talk about (I think gamers will learn pretty much all they need without ‘learning’, just ‘playing’) but they don’t readily wrap around the tragically common ideology of education – learning by absorption. Games and Virtual Worlds crossover, some lack narrative making them more motivating others have clear objectives and sequences (just like life). Using games still requires considered alignment of outcome, activity and assessment. In games of course, they usually come with all three in a flurry of graphics, sound and immersive action. Attempting to graft Call of Duty into a History class is likely to achieve nothing, apart from the horror of parents and administrators.
To use games well, you have to understand them well – so see how they are constructed, how levels work, how the story builds. You have to sink time into them – especially if you want to become part of the sub-cultures that they create. I can’t tell you about Aion unless you play Aion, just as a movie and never replicate the motivation and immersion of a mmo – where you are the director.
In many cases you have to think how to adapt it to a new teaching strategy – and develop new resources as well as assessment. The tools needed are more complex (Blender, Unity3D, Linden Script) that hacking out another Ning; and the teaching methods need to be adapted from existing models such as scenario based or project based learning. It is worth the effort however, but it is hard. I don’t want to pour water on the fire – just to point out that the authors of new curricula online, are increasingly drifting away from earlier blogs, podcasts and wikis – and increasingly interested in the development of virtual worlds and adaptation of games, consoles and devices.
Games are perhaps being brought into focus by new devices and immersive technical developments. Increasing access to software such as Unity3D for free, or the maturation of online tutorials to learn other free Open Source development tools for meshing and object building – Blender, Scratch, SketchUp etc. and spaces to use them – Open Sim, Hyper Grid etc, with new viewers and new communities such as KoinUp.
The world is playing casual games on Facebook … social games are on consoles, hell even facebook is on consoles – and yet despite all of this – we still theorise and debate ‘games’. Immersive learning is motivating and is cultural. They rapidly achieve ‘collective action’, when many blogging communities in school barely allow communication. Be carefull about the the linguistic interpretations of talking about game-based. Both games and enquiry based is alien DNA still. Treat a game like a great novel you and run around in or bring to life. Use it’s components to augment what it is you are trying to teach – but most of all – look past blogs, wikis and podcasts and learn about avatars.
And one last note – Unlike Wikis, ‘game based’ is going to take much longer, so as exciting at is appears, game-based presents more reasons to churn than Web2.0. But that’s no reason not to try.
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