Archive for category eLearning
It’s here, it’s here!!
We’re all a bit excited today at Curatr HQ – it’s here!!!
After a year or so of development, we’re very pleased to announce today that we’ve officially launched our new platform to power Social Learning – Curatr.
Check our new website at www.curatr.co.uk and have a look see our flashy video:
Or if you want a slightly more long-winded version (with a dog asleep in the background):
Harry Potter and the future of the Textbook
The Daily Prophet is the newspaper of choice for the discerning witch or wizard, this much we all know. With moving pictures and articles on every topic of interest, the Prophet is a fine advance on the offerings afforded to us muggles.
Or is it? You see I’m increasingly of the opinion that JK Rowling aimed too low with her imagination on this part. She couldn’t foresee the way in which things like newspapers and textbooks would really be consumed if the magic (read: technology) was widely available.
To take you further in to the future of textbooks, I first have to take you back, way back…
Socrates, he of Ancient Greek persuasion, was said to have lamented the adoption of the written word for scholarly activities. So much did he lament it that his student Plato wrote it down, presumably without his master’s permission (the first data protection violation in recorded history perhaps?). Socrates claim was that true knowledge was built-up in memory through the use of spoken stories and fables.
Fast forward to the 1400’s and the emergence of one Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. Gutenburg, as his mates called him, is widely regarded as the inventor of the Printing Press. His invention was the technology that enabled textbooks to exist.
Schools had already been around in documented history for some time (my own secondary school was founded in 1440) but they were places that followed Socrates’ techniques more than those methods we use today. Teachers were in possession of the tacit knowledge of the world and they used the classroom to impart their knowledge to students. Increasingly however, the need for more explicit knowledge was emerging. Specifically the need for standardised, explicit knowledge which would help to classify our world and aid both learning and teaching.
This could perhaps be termed the problem that textbooks were originally designed to solve: The increasing demand for explicit knowledge in an unstructured world. It took centuries for books to move from Gutenburg’s invention to the classrooms of the world, but the rest, as they say, is history.
Fast-forward to today and its easy to suggest that the problems that led to the invention of the textbook aren’t necessarily ones that we face today. Explicit knowledge is in abundance. Many might suggest that too many people have started writing their thoughts down for others to read. Our knowledge of the world today is highly structured and organised – a place for everything and everything in its place.
It’s fair to say that E-textbooks haven’t really taken off yet. In fact, anecdotal research like that carried out by Esther Wojcicki is telling us that some proportion of the population is stuck in Socrates mode. They are lamenting the onslaught of the E-textbook before it’s even really begun to arrive.
Mostly they have no good reason; it strikes me as being quite a defensive and vitriolic response which belies a true understanding of the change they see before them. Like JK Rowling, these students have failed to appreciate the shape and the size of the change that is coming.
To find out more about the future of the textbook it is useful to draw analogies to the music industry. Previously we all brought our music on CDs – I hear there used to be things called cassettes and before that, vinyl, but it sounds like a far-fetched story to me. CDs still exist of course but the demand for them has fallen considerably thanks to rise of platforms like iTunes. This allows us to purchase music with greater granularity than before (no more ‘B-sides’) and gave us an easy method to process micro-payments.
But now we are on the verge of another breakthrough change in the music industry; on-demand.
Music services like Spotify are changing the way in which people consume music. Previously we liked the tangible asset we got when we brought a CD. ITunes took away that physical object and introduced us to the idea of buying something that was digital. Spotify takes this a step further; if we aren’t going to physically own anything, then why buy it?
Surely it would be better to ‘rent’ it for the period of time you want it? Spotify, we7 and mFlow are just some of the names that are working from this principle. They give you access to a world of music whenever you want for a price (sometimes that price is free, with adverts, but most will push you towards a Premium Service for a monthly subscription).
The future of textbooks
This, I believe is the future of Textbooks.
E-books have a place. Specifically they work fairly well for books with a distinctive narrative that need to be read one page after another. That simply isn’t the case with Textbooks. In most cases you don’t need to read Chapter 3 before you read Chapter 17. In fact many Textbooks go out of their way to interrupt your flow of reading, introducing shout-out boxes with examples etc…
Publishers have spent the last 10 years building a huge amount of content that backs-up the printed book in the form of additional digital assets. Like record companies before them, Publishers have a massive back catalogue of content that they would love to make more money from. This is the opportunity to open up this mountain of content to the masses.
In my scenario I wouldn’t envisage readers really ever downloading a complete book; how iTunes broke up the album, I expect Publishers to break down their written content to smaller and smaller grains.
If the platform were to be social at the same time, then we’d generate a situation where users could curate learning content for their own use and publish these collections as guides for their follower’s to use. Over the life of a subscription a user would build up a very rich resource of content which they found useful; a guide to how they learnt everything they needed for a 3 year course at university for example.
It goes without saying that this platform would need to be delivered via mobile and, right now, the best candidate to make that happen is the iPad. This is the only device I have seen that is both portable and rich enough to deliver this experience so far. I’m sure many more will follow suit as the advantages of the device make themselves clearer and it defines its place in the hardware marketplace. But as it stands, this is the only way I would deliver written, visual, audio and cloud-based content to a handheld device.
In terms of the software to make it happen… Well that would be Curatr of course!
The Spotify model has attractive financial implications for both Publishers and Consumers of textbooks. It’s no great secret that the way in which the textbook marketplace operates is somewhat broken market. Students today are spending an average of £1,200 on books over the length of a university degree course. Publishers are searching for more and more ways to unlock the revenue streams that could exist for their back catalogue. Right now they make a substantial amount of their money from a tiny minority of their lists.
Of course money was never a problem for Harry Potter. But you can imagine the savings the Weasley family could have made over the lifetime of their children’s studies…
Curatr Beta Update – July!
Well we’ve been busy in the last month, working to get Curatr up to what we want it to be for launch, which I pleased to say is rather imminent now. We are now signing up launch partners to trial Curatr commercially in the coming weeks and months; if you would like to know more about these opportunities then please do just send me a message.
Update Details:
Added Peer View, which allows you to:
View all participants in a museum
View all participants that you are following
View all participants that are following you
Search all participants
View user profiles
View users according to rank, experience, influence or activity
Added Comments system, which allows you to:
Comment on any object
Reply to comments in a threaded view
Added Alerts system, which allows you to:
Receive email and in-game alerts of updates to Objects, People and Comments
Update your privacy settings as required
Added Similar Objects, which allows you to:
See Objects that are like the Object you are currently viewing, throughout all Users uploads.
Updated User Profiles, which now allow you to:
Upload pictures and further information
View statistics on your own performance, tracked over time.
Plus, lots of tweaks:
Every algorithm in the system has been updated thanks to user feedback on how we were working.
Graphics improved
Load times halved
Add Object refined further
As always, if you want to get involved in the Beta testing then please head over to Curatr and use the little signup box from the top right corner!
Ben
Curatr will get you laid!
John Nash sits awkwardly and alone, surrounded by papers and a half-drunk beer in a smoky 1940’s bar. His peers gather around him, captivated by the blonde woman who just walked in. They sit; smoking and drinking whilst pontificating on which one of them will bag the blonde. Each agrees that the others have no chance with her, but they are willing to back themselves. Nash sits quietly, pencil twiddling in his hands. His pondering on game theory reminds him of the competition for the blonde he is witnessing. A smile creases across his face as a magical moment of connection occurs in his mind.
“If we all go for the blonde and block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her” starts Nash. “So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because no one likes to be second choice”. Heads nod in agreement; we’ve all been there before. Nash continues, “But what if none of us goes for the blonde? We won’t get in each other’s way and we won’t insult the other girls. It’s the only way to win. It’s the only way we all get laid”.
Nash’s friends look sceptical at best. It’s a nice idea, but competition is competition; even Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself.
“Incomplete!” Nash blurts out, his excitement no longer containable within his mind alone. “Incomplete, okay? Because the best result will come from everyone in the group doing what’s best for himself and the group”.
Such is the story of John Nash’s foundations for his “Nash Equilibrium”, as re-told by the 2001 Ron Howard film, A Beautiful Mind. Supposedly it was this realisation that lead Nash to the concept that something as fundamental as Adam Smith’s principles were actually incomplete.
Simplistically speaking, Adam Smith’s notion that players in a market will do entirely what is best for themselves was refuted. Nash proved that it would be a better result, mathematically, if they all did what was best for themselves AND the group.
Recently I’ve been working on the notion of cooperation and competition in education for our new Social Learning platform, Curatr. Cooperation is a fundamental concept in the field of Social Learning; that if the actors in a piece think and work collectively they will gain benefit above and beyond working in isolation. There’s a lot of support for this approach in online learning, not least because it fixes some of the stuff we broke when we left the classroom for E-learning.
On the other hand, competition is a hotly disputed concept in education. Traditional education systems are set for competition throughout their framework, with grade scores and attainment being at the pinnacle of this system. But the true benefits of such a system are disputed strongly by researchers like Alfie Kohn. His work is well documented and well argued, but for me the most obvious principle is that, in any competition, you will have a winner and whole lot of losers. It’s this kind of thinking that leads us to believe that competition is inherently bad. This is Adam Smith style competition however; everyone wants to be the best, so they further themselves but only one person emerges victorious in the end. This sort of behaviour is typical of Zero-Sum games and what Game Theorists might call Strictly Competitive behaviour. This can be changed in a Non-Zero-Sum environment however.
Cooperating in Non-Cooperative Games:
It might sound like a misnomer, but it isn’t. In Game Theory the idea of “non-cooperative” is very specific – it indicates that players make decisions independent of each other. In Curatr we have an environment in which each player is free to pursue the strategy they wish to.
Game Theorists have a method for plotting and calculating the best strategies for a given situation in what they would call a pay-off matrix. Below is a simplified version of the pay-off matrix for going home with the blonde, where the possible strategies between two players are going for the blonde first, or going to the friends.
Pay Off Matrix - the Blonde in the Bar
If every player in the group goes for the blonde, they all strike-out, as they block each other. As soon as Player 1 escalates his strategy to get the Blonde, the others are forced to follow suit, after all, why would you let your friend go after the Blonde, she is the best possible outcome of acting alone. But you are not acting alone, you are in a group and of course now everyone blocks each other and the Blonde’s friends subsequently tell them to “Go to Hell!”
Because of the nature of the game, where you act as a part of a non-cooperative group, the best possible outcome of acting alone isn’t open to you. The group will respond to your strategy, so going that way is a recipe for disaster. You must adopt the best strategy for you AND the group, which in this case is the bottom right cell, Everyone Gets Lucky.
Now let’s make a leap into the world of Curatr, which is a competitive environment where it is possible for you to “win”; to come first. Coming first will be the result of contributing, sharing and viewing more than anyone else, which will take quite a lot of hard work to achieve. In our payoff matrix we will list two possible strategies – “First” to represent the strategy of coming first and “In The Pack” to represent a strategy of contributing about as much as everyone else in the group. Note that we eliminate a 3rd possibility, contributing nothing, because without contribution you cannot progress through the game at all.
Pay Off Matrix - Curatr
As soon as a player decides to adopt the “First” strategy, the others in the group go with them (“Go To Hell if you’re coming first!”), all adopting the same strategy so as to avoid being left way behind in a race to the top – the desire to win still exists. But by adopting this strategy there is a constant one-upmanship, which grows the content exponentially. Here “Information Overload” occurs and the players block each on the route to success.
The best strategy for themselves AND the group is actually the bottom right, seeking to contribute enough to be “In The Pack”, but never seeking the glory of coming first.
OK, so what?!
Curatr is a game-like environment because we believe that elements of games and gaming are absolutely key in promoting user engagement (see the book, Total Engagement, for others working in this area). We allow users to compete with each other, but significantly, coming first is not the goal of this competition. The best strategy for playing Curatr is to cooperate with your peers in order to maximise the outcome, without any single person stealing the glory.
If the hot blonde in the bar is the best possible outcome for a single player, then we have created a system that encourages players to go for the friend, which is the best possible outcome for the individual AND the group.
So there you have it. Curatr will get you laid.
Curatr Beta – new version
For those of you lucky enough to be on the Curatr Beta (hint: click this link to emulate their success) we’ve just released a new version. Because we’re imaginative we’ve called this version “0.2″. Here’s a small video to celebrate that:
Headlines:
- We got some great data from our experiments – thanks for taking part.
- All of you are now on the same platform, with all the features we’ve made available so far turned on.
- The biggest changes are in the navigation (old one was too confusing) and the social aspects.
- Now each user has their own “canvas” on to which they can share objects or add new.
- You can then choose to follow new users to help give a different perspective on the learning.
- Everyone now has their own classroom, of which they are the administrator.
- You can use the admin link (check your emails) to invite up to 20 people to view your Curatr Classroom.
As always, the more feedback the better. We’ve still got a way to go before we’ve showcased the full functionality of Curatr, but we’re getting there!
Ben
Curatr Beta Update: Getting Social
A couple of weeks ago we launched our first versions of the Curatr Beta trial. We placed our testers into 8 groups and offered different features for them to play around with. The initial findings of these tests look to be quite compelling and we’ll be sharing them just as soon as we can.
We also got lots of great user feedback from this first round of testing and we’ve made a few changes in response to this. Screen casts like that from Noah Sparks were invaluable in showing us how people started to use our system and where it was falling short.
So, what’s new in version 0.2?
Your own playground:
Those of you on the beta will know that so far you’ve all been playing in a single large sandpit. This is great for a quick experience of what the product offers but it doesn’t help you to start realising your own use of Curatr. So for this next version everyone will get a sandpit of their own to play in as well. Here you will be able to upload objects, define collections, levels and guides and to enrol other users to participate in your testing.
We’ve been spending a good deal of time designing the flow of information in our “Add an Object” section; it was released pretty raw and whilst a lot of people had a great go at it, filling it out wasn’t easy. The modifications we make here should make this process significantly easier and much more robust.
We’re getting social:
In our first version we presented users with an object-centric view of the world. You could highlight individual contributions, but we hadn’t yet implemented proper “follower” features or sharing. This is all about to change.
Now when you enter into a Curatr Classroom you will notice a Peer is at the centre of the Objects. The Objects on the page are those which that Peer has shared. By following new Peers you can get access to other people’s home screens, collections and guides.
The experts view of the objects will remain the default selected and from this point going forward this person is known as the “Curatr”. As you go and browse through the Curatr’s Objects you can share objects you like by hitting the “share” button. This object will then become a part of your home page.
Finding new followers is something which we will be implementing over both this version and the next. We’ve got something pretty good in-store for organising your peers but we can’t fully implement that in this next version, so it will have to wait!
New Navigation and Search:
I was over the moon when a Twitter user picked up on the fact that previous navigation bar “looks like the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy”; my constant source of inspiration. But despite this, it had clear flaws. It was slow in places, was poor for filtering guides and a complete pain for us to code. It had to go.
So we’ve gone back to basics now, simple being best. Our navigation now makes it very straightforward to select Collections, Sub-Collections and Guides at any stage of your viewing. It also enabled us to implement a fantastic search capability which alters the canvas in real-time given your input; check out the screen shot.
That’s it for now!
Version 0.2 should hit sometime next week if our internal testing goes well and we hope you’ll continue to give us your feedback and your opinion on what we’re doing.
-Ben
A quick note on the forthcoming Curatr private beta
Firstly, let me say that we’ve been overwhelmed by the level of enthusiasm we’ve seen for our idea in the last week or so – truly. Thus far our private beta has had signups from around 150 different organisations, covering 28 countries from all over the globe. We’re seeing interest at every level of education, from schools to corporates. So thank you to all who have taken the time to view our website and signup; you will make this experience a whole lot better for your time and effort.
To the business of what we intend to do…
Well first of all, this won’t be quite like a normal beta test. Because we’ve got academic interests in the outcome of this testing, we’ll be splitting participants into one of a few different groups to try out the software. Each group will have a slightly different experience, be that the features on offer, the other people you interact with or the subject matter.
Initially we are going to get participants to test in collective areas. This means you won’t be “getting” your own Curatr to do as you want with right away. Testing social software in isolation isn’t really a test!
We’re going to be collecting feedback as we go and we’ll then be looking to iterate quickly, adding features and fixing bugs on the fly. At the moment we’ve scheduled 5 feature releases, taking us from Beta 0.1 initially, up to 0.6.
Right now we’re modifying Curatr as a result of internal testing. I expect this to last a week or so, then we’ll launch the beta.
We’re going to leave the private beta signup live for this time, so its not too late to get involved if you still want to. Please visit www.curatr.co.uk and fill out the little form in the lightbox window.
- Ben
Curatr – a new platform for online learning
I’ve been a little bit radio silent over the last couple of weeks as we’ve approached the soft launch of our latest creation, Curatr. But now it’s finally time to break cover and see if we can get people as excited about our little creation as we are. So that’s what I’m going to try and do!
First of all, a flashy video. Sorry, but it will actually benefit your understanding of what we are trying to do here and I can’t explain it any better in less than 2 mins!
So fundamentally, Curatr is a new platform for delivering learning experiences over the web. It is the result of us trying to marry-up some great new approaches that have been emerging themes in E-learning for a little while now. At its core are a couple of key principles:
• E-learning works best as a two-way process.
• We can learn from anything.
We’ve added a few more facets to the central tenets as we’ve gone along and there is any number of buzzwords that you can use to describe them. We’re talking social learning, personalised learning, mobile learning, learning by exploration, games based learning and many more.
The upshot of all this is that Curatr is what you make of it and I wouldn’t want to suggest it is the be-all and end-all answer to any of those genres. But it certainly takes a leaf out of their respective books and allows for users to create a learning experience built around whatever approach they deem most suitable. So long as it keeps the two key principles.
The result is something quite different. And, in order to practice what I preach, I made a video in order to explain it, instead of you having to read pages of my waffle!
Right now we are looking for private beta testers to help us bring the project along in the next few weeks. Head over to www.curatr.co.uk to find out more, watch the same videos again and sign-up to the beta.
We’re looking to deliver our first public release as quickly as possible and I promise some innovative approaches to the commercial proposition that goes with it.
I’ll be talking more on the blog about the theory behind it and the features we incorporate but, in the meantime, if you’ve got any questions for me please feel free to put them in the comments here!
On the future of Digital Games Based Learning in Corporate E-learning.
Having recently attended the Games Based Learning conference 2010, I’ve come away a little bit inspired and a little bit confused. Inspired enough to shoot off a bunch of emails to clients about what games could do for their learning. Confused enough to wonder if there is any point turning my business towards this genre.
I actually missed a significant proportion of day 2 of the conference due to a client meeting, hence why I didn’t follow up my previous blog too quickly. As such this entry is a summary of my own thoughts and my impressions from the events; if you think I’m plagiarising someone else’s concepts, I probably am. I’m not saying I’m 100% right on any of this, but this is the thinking that is going to inform my company’s strategy in this genre for the short/medium term:
Video Games Based
A number of examples which we saw GBL10 were on the use of full-on 3D worlds for Learning. These games look and feel like something you’d play on an X-Box (in fact, you might!) and share a number of common attributes:
• They take a highly skilled team of programmers, designers, writers, artists, amongst others to create.
• They take time, months and perhaps years to create.
• They cost a fortune on a “per hour” of learning basis (at least 6 figures).
• They need a forward-thinking project commissioner, willing to take a risk on an innovation.
• They require a higher level of hardware specification to run than might be considered “standard” for many corporate work terminals.
If you take these factors you start to build a picture of the sort of situation where a video game for corporate training is going to be suitable.
Realistically, if you are a project commissioner who has the budget and ambition to realise a video game for training then you are going to turn to established video game experts for the creation of at least some aspects of the end product. It’s the video games houses that hold all the key competencies in this area and you would be mad to do it without their advice.
So the question becomes, how big is this market? Is it worth me re-training my staff to address this? You only have to look at the factors above to know the answer. Big budgets, long lead times, highly innovative, low accessibility – these are all the things that corporate E-learning is moving away from, rapidly. In fact, with a few notable exceptions (which become notable exactly because they ARE the exception), the overwhelming amount of projects in this area will come from one of three areas:
• Military / Defence / Security
• Healthcare
• Public initiatives
I’d suggest that perhaps 2 out of every 3 corporate video games for learning that exist right now are covered by the first 2 categories alone. The key reason for this exception is risk. Where people’s lives are on the line big budgets are available for obvious reasons.
Without being too IBM and given the above statements, I believe that there is a very limited role for purely corporate training video games developers in the UK. The majority of the work will fall to commercial games developers with a track record and the ability to contract in learning technologists where appropriate. To be an independent company working in this genre means almost complete market dominance, especially in the current economic environment.
Video games often limit their corporate appeal because they don’t ‘look’ like learning. Some might take this as a very generation X approach. But here are two facts for you:
1. Most decision makers in corporate organisations are aged 35+.
I don’t know about your organisation, but I need to make money tomorrow, so selling to these people is the task at hand. And this is a demographic that the video games industry has found it very hard to connect with.
Making your corporate learning game look like a video game, even if it isn’t, is a largely pointless activity for mass market penetration. Sure there are exceptions, but targeting exceptions to the majority rule is not exactly a marketing plan.
This isn’t to say that your solution shouldn’t look great – it absolutely should. The trouble with video games is that, in order to make a good looking one, you need to be at the forefront of technology. If you make a half-baked attempt at looking like Call of Duty because you think that will appeal to your audience, all they are going to think is “this looks like crap compared with Call of Duty”. Pick your fights; this isn’t one you can win.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Caspian Learning have sought to simplify corporate training video games development to cut lead times, cut budgets and increase accessibility. They’ve done some good work here and continue to expand, but I rather suspect they are going to be the dominant player in a small marketplace – sure they have a big slice of the cake, but the cakes not huge.
E-learning companies would be vastly better off collaborating with them than competing against them.
Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) video games
COTS video games for learning is a slightly different story. Here the development costs are covered by the game developers. All an organisation is going to pay is a license fee, something like £40 each. Of course the games themselves aren’t really where the learning comes in, they are used mostly as an engagement tool. Around this engagement a curriculum is based, building on the subject matter or the story whilst introducing learning objectives. This is working really well for schools (especially in Scotland, which must be close to the world leader if it isn’t). But I haven’t heard of any examples of it in the corporate training world.
That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but even if it does, it seems unlikely there is an opportunity for E-learning developers to do much here – an internal function could do this easily.
Casual Games learning
By the term “casual game” I’m referring to the small games which are easily picked up and are usually delivered via a mobile device or web browser. Thanks to the prevalence of the iPhone and its Apps marketplace, this sort of game has mushroomed in popularity in the last two years. Whilst casual games come in all shapes and sizes, they mostly share some common properties:
• Short development time, characterised with updates and iterations to improve the game after release.
• Relatively low development cost, a few thousand pounds.
• Limited functionality and scope, but very easy to use and often addictive in nature.
• Developed by small teams or individuals
• Very cheap to purchase as COTS
• Questionable educational worth
The last point here is perhaps a touch controversial, but my reasoning is that with the limited functionality of a casual game there often isn’t the time or scope to put across any detailed learning objective.
Casual Games have a number of advantages over video games in the eyes of corporate training – mostly around cost. But do they offer the same thing? Probably not. Casual games are just that, casual. With the commercial marketplace growing so rapidly, and with so many games being developed, it seems likely that whatever purpose you can think of for creating a casual game, something similar will already be in the marketplace. And with costs averaging around £1 per unit on the iPhone app store, you’d be pretty nuts to think of developing your own version.
Given their limited scope, I don’t believe that creating customised casual games for corporate training will be a marketplace for us (or anyone else in fact). If you are intending to create casual games for corporate training and sell them to the commercial market, you might have a chance. Covering your few thousand pounds of development cost by shipping a thousand downloads, it’s worth a punt. But if you were a corporate training department commissioning such a project, you’d have to be very sure that something similar didn’t already exist, around which you could build your curriculum in the same way as COTS.
In fact I suspect that corporate efforts to create casual games will fail because they lack the “casual” approach that makes these games appealing. What is casual about a bit of corporate training?
In conclusion
Despite seeing some great examples and being heavily inspired on occasion, I won’t be turning my company into a games development outfit any time soon. I do believe that standalone games have a place as a part of the “blend” that E-learning offers, but these are likely to be small, bespoke pieces of work that sit alongside other offerings.
Where I actually see the future of games in corporate learning is more in the application of the principles which they embody and in the engagement which they can create. Social learning is a big battle ground for E-learning at the moment and in my next post I’m going to detail what we are doing to take social learning online to the next level, using the principles of games based learning.
Games Based Learning Conference, day 1 [updated]
I had a number of people ask me to report back on the Games Based Learning (GBL) conference this year, so I thought I’d do it in blog form instead of sending out emails!
First up we heard from Ed Vaisey, MP. To be perfectly honest I didn’t hear anything of real interest from him, other than an acknowledgment that video gaming is recognised as an important UK industry. I would have been pretty surprised had he said otherwise!
We heard from LittleBIGPlanet, a best selling commercial game. I must admit I haven’t ever played the game, so a lot of it went over my head. However, at the core of the game is the ability for players to create their own levels, their own games and their own scenarios with other players. I’m going to go and get a copy as the work they’ve done is very interesting and the number they’ve reached are astounding.
Derek Robertson spoke next, this time on the use of commercial games for primary school kids. No doubt this is a cost effective way of doing things – slotting curriculum around suitable commercial games. Primary school teaching in Scotland sounds nothing short of a revolution at the moment; a Wii in every school. Not exactly Bill Gates’ dream, but certainly close to mine.
Gill Penny built on this talk later on in the day, talking about her experiences as a head teacher of a primary school in Scotland. She touched on a lot of points but at the heart of her argument was that a £30 investment in a video game can create a great level of engagement amongst students, given a well planned structure, put around the game. These kids are blending the video game with complete experiences – when they play Wii Winter Olympics they not only played the game, they researched the countries, they created their own teams, designed uniforms, learnt foreign languages and had a web-chat with a school in Canada. Creating stories was at the heart of Gill’s presentation, the games themselves simply helped build the engagement.
Following Gill, “Made In Me” built upon the story theme with their software which allows for early years education to become a collaborative experience between the adult and the child. To be honest I felt a lot like you needed to actually have kids to appreciate what was bring said – its not my area. That said, the software looks great and its premise of essentially being a User Generated Content game is right up my street, only a different demographic. It’s a work in progress, but the demo was pretty awesome. Fantastic style and animation coupled with some nice pedagogy, interaction and exploration. Did I mention it looks awesome? Cbeebies wants to watch out, this is certainly worth keeping tabs on, especially if you do have young kids.
We also heard from Matt Mason, author of “The Pirates Dilemma”. His talk was hugely engaging and the points he made were really original. I can’t do him justice here, so go read his book (for free if you want), but the gist of it is that piracy isn’t all bad and there is a lot a company can do to capitalise on it, without resorting to smacking their customers around the head. At one point he was asked if he got any utility from giving away his book for free online and his response was priceless – apparently Jay-Z’s producer read a bit of the book online, then went down to his local bookstore and brought every copy before handing them out to Jay-Z, Kanye West and the entire Def Jam records senior management. That’s a fair return!
Later on in the day I left the main room for the breakout sessions downstairs. By all reports I missed a great presentation by Tim Rylands and an equally engaging session by Ewan McIntosh, but I think the Alternate Reality Gaming session I attended was probably more relevant to me.
First up, Kris Rockwell from Hybrid Learning talked about their use of an Alternate Reality Game to get people engaged in a state-side conference. This was all about subtle hints that a game was in the off’ing – a seemingly random web address being posted somewhere, a place to meet, a stray business card being left around the place. This is lo-tech gaming which scales well, if you can get enough people interested in the game in the first place. Lots of opportunities for the utilisation of free web tools here – Facebook, Flickr, Ning, Twitter and so on, although Kris did mention they avoided Facebook thanks to the amount of corporate firewalls blocking it.
This was followed up by a 2nd ARG session by Alex Moseley and Simon Brookes, who had completed a couple of different case examples. Again its early days for this sort of thing, but I immediately connected with Simon’s example, where-by students are immersed into an alternate reality as a business simulation. Simon and his team have basically created a fictional town online to play out the game, with websites (with relevant domain names) for various businesses and even the local council. Again, all done cheaply (WordPress mostly) and all re-usable. I took away from this the importance of not “shattering the illusion” of the alternate reality; once the game has started it must be seen through, almost on the same principles of not breaking the 4th wall. I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of money to be made here, but that’s kind of the point and I’ve already got a project in mind where we could use this approach. We drifted away from the concept of “Digital Games Based Learning” in this session, but then again, that’s not the title of the conference!
Interestingly I’ve gotten the impression throughout the conference that “E-learning” is something done by other companies in a different industry. There’s a limited number of corporate E-learning developers here, perhaps just 4 or 5 of us total. It seems a little like the two sides are somewhat juxtaposed to each other – GBL thinking that E-learning is just page-turning, boring, unengaged corporate garbage and E-learning thinking that GBL isn’t a credible alternative; too expensive and with little proof of its reliability in a work learning setting. Both views are of course right and wrong, with examples littering the pathways before us. But it’s this “difference” which fascinates me.
The only people I’ve spoken too at the conference bridging this gap are Caspian Learning, with their product Thinking Worlds. I downloaded a demo a year or more ago and had a play around with it – long story short, it’s a GUI engine for building immersive 3D learning games. Speaking with them it sounds like they’ve had quite a lot of success in getting their product into a range of companies, licensing it for the in-house development of games. But at least half of their income will actually come from the servitisation of this product; building the games themselves, offering up training and implementation assistance and so on.
I suppose on one-hand you might think of Caspian as a competitor to HT2, but realistically we aren’t going to be competing for the same projects. Far more likely is HT2 as a customer of Caspian and perhaps even visa-versa when it comes to the service. There is a business model for those e-learning developers who would choose to become “expert” in developing games using this sort of engine. Lord knows how much time, money and thought have gone into developing the product thus far and it would seem an unlikely path to tread, trying to emulate the software.
This is an area the E-learning industry has been historically bad at. You don’t tend to see E-learning developers becoming experts in others software (it does happen, but not as often as the alternative). Far more likely is that a situation is deemed “too unique” for any of the current market offerings and a new piece of software emerges. You only need to look at the array of LMS, VLE and the like that are offered in the marketplace to see this happening. We’re just as guilty as the next here, but then again we are looking to innovate beyond simple LMS’ and we’re also looking towards things like Moodle integration.
I’m out at a client meeting this morning, but should be back for the final afternoon’s session at #gbl10 so will report back more later…
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