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…
Powwow Water bites the dust
Well, I think we all knew it was coming. According to a few news reports Powwow Water was taken into administration on Thursday evening. Deloitte were appointed and decided that the business could not continue operating in its current state.
My heart goes out to those staff who have been made redundant – especially anyone who has been working all month for no pay!
As you may or may not know, I had a bit of run-in with the previous owners over this blog. The running theme amongst those people who responded to that post in the comments (now closed) was that the company “could not be long for this world”.
Turns out they were right. I suspect history will record that cash flow was the cause of death. But we all know that awful customer service policy was the underlying disease…
Managing the Social Learning Mess: Auto-curating content
Let us suppose that we’ve created a social approach to online learning, where-by our users not only take content from our Learning Environment, but actively add content to it as a part of their participation. One of the biggest problems facing those tasked with administrating such a platform is going to be information overload.
I admit this stage is somewhat ‘down the line’ in terms of a successful social learning environment, but to ignore planning for this would be short-sighted.
Simply leaving the task to administrators is not often a viable option; online learning is supposed to cut administration work, not make it worse. Developing a good taxonomy and naming convention can certainly help to spread the load, but this too has limitations.
What is required is a method of ‘Curating’ the content that your learners contribute. The role of the Curator is a vital one; sorting the wheat from the chaff and bringing some sort of order to what would otherwise be chaos.
Curators also go beyond these functions and use learning objects to tell us a story, providing deeper insight into what would otherwise be just a collection of ‘things’. But the job is a difficult one, requiring a subject matter expert and a good deal of time; see this post by Jeff Cobb on the need for good content curators.
In developing our new software, we’ve been looking into ways of “auto-curating” content which learners contribute to the learning environment. This is just one piece of a much larger puzzle that our latest product seeks to address, but it is a vital piece none-the-less.
A bit of background on how our learning environment works:
Learning objects are first of all organised into collections. Collections can be as be as big or as small as the editors of the learning environment deem appropriate. For example we may have a “dinosaur” collection, or perhaps we would look to do things at the level of the “T-rex”. Indeed, for those of us very involved in palaeontology we might choose to make our collections at an even ‘lower’ level, for example “the foot bones of the T-rex”.
Within collections sit objects. One object can exist in many collections. Objects can be any piece of digital information, from a web-link to a video, to an animation.
These objects carry with them an array of metadata, including details such as keywords. It is relatively easy to suggest that an object is like another object by using these details, but it is not a perfect match. And when we open our learning environment to contributions from all-comers, it is not easy to enforce a metadata tagging system which is always used, or always used correctly. Such data also fails to take into account the perceived quality of a learning object – do a lot of people view this object and rate it as a worthy object?
What if we could tell that an object was like another object without it actually sharing any metadata at all? We would be then in a position to automatically suggest which learning objects were related to each other and to start the Curation process without the need for human intervention.
Using a range of semantic web techniques, this is what we have attempted to do. Firstly, by adopting the Resource Descriptor Framework (RDF) in storing our learning objects, we are able to discover a lot more about the objects.
For example, think about Wines (I tend to veer towards alcohol metaphors when things get complex). The following statement breaks down the Stonleigh Sauvignon Blanc into an RDF readable format: (example taken from W3C)
SauvignonBlanc rdf:ID=”StonleighSauvignonBlanc”
locatedIn rdf:resource=”#NewZealandRegion”
hasMaker rdf:resource=”#Stonleigh”
hasSugar rdf:resource=”#Dry”
hasFlavor rdf:resource=”#Delicate”
hasBody rdf:resource=”#Medium”
SauvignonBlanc
Because of the way in which the information contained here is broken down, we can tell on a number of levels what a Stonleigh Sauvignon Blanc is like. It could be grouped with other Wines which are of Delicate flavour. Or perhaps we just want to group it with other Wines produced by the same Maker – Stonleigh. Or we can use combinations of multiple nodes to infer which wines the Stonleigh is most like.
Outside of RDF, we can also infer an amount of information about an object given other objects that we know connect to it in someway. Our software allows users to connect objects together as a part of their own “guides” – a way of knitting objects together to create a logical sequence of learning. Where these guides include some objects which share metadata, and some which do not, we are able to infer if an object is like another object.
Taking a crowd-sourced approach to grading our learning objects, we can also discover more about the usefulness of an object and its quality. This allows us to curate objects to not only find like objects, but also to find like objects of a certain quality.
In short, by utilising a number of semantic web techniques, we are aiming to create a learning environment that has the ability to organise any amount of content into suitable categories automatically. There remains a need for human intervention at some levels – for instance, the final “sense” check before things are sent live – but the workload is vastly reduced.
This is just one of the innovations we are looking to introduce with our new software, which we’ve aptly named Curatr. I’ll be blogging more on the features of Curatr in the coming weeks, but its safe to say we’re pretty excited about it.
How should vendors sell to you?
Community halls are cold places at the best of times. The hard, hollow flooring, bordered by dull, white-washed walls. The strip lighting, harsh with the occasional flicker, bathing the room in a sickly yellow hue. These are cold places for cold people, those with problems. Those people with a confession to make.
The refreshment table was laden with extra bitter coffee, like it alone could cleanse the souls of those within its reach. The biscuit tray lay beaten, already pummelled into submission by the gaggle of desperate looking zombies who filed into the room slowly, sullenly. The chairs creaked and squeaked against the hard floor as people took their seats in the circle. It was time. I rose to my feet, hesitant, but expectant as to the relief that would follow my confession.
“My name is Ben” my voice trembled. “And I’m a Vendor”…
——————————————-
It’s not easy to admit it, but give me a chance and I will sell you something. Whilst I am also an academic researcher, my job first and foremost is in the retail of E-learning products and services.
One of the toughest aspects of my job is working up decent sales leads. I myself loath cold callers. I hate advertising. Networking is painful. Events are boring. But come what may, it’s still got to happen somehow.
Today I’ve seen loads of tweets passing my eyes on the subject of social learning software and how to be weary of vendors selling you snake oil (see Harold Jarche, Jane Hart and Jay Cross). There’s a similar theme elsewhere too.
The bottom line is, vendors talk a lot of shit and generally screw up a good idea.
I can’t disagree, it’s true.
But vendors still need to appeal to consumers in ways that differentiate themselves from the competition. If I tell you that my social learning software is great, but it won’t create a culture of informal learning without a massive behavioural change effort and that, at best, you’ve got maybe a 25% chance of seeing a return, I’m not going to be in business long. So how can I get noticed without the hyperbole, without the empty promises?
We’re in the midst of developing a new piece of software which we are all quite excited about. It’s not going to “formalise informal learning” or anything like that. It certainly won’t transform your workforce into a legion of web 2.0 advocates, blogging their way into profits. But it will look to abandon the old “E-learning Course” structure, encourage users to connect concepts together and add new learning objects to create a unique learning environment. Engage, Connect, Contribute. That’s our tag line for it. Catchy eh!?
But we’re already following down the same path as those vendors which went before us. So how can we do it differently?
• Cold calling doesn’t work for this sort of thing; no one has a clue what you are talking about and the number of “shots on goal” you have to make before you score is absurd.
• Advertising is expensive and poorly targeted.
• Expensive networking events are generally snake oil in and of themselves.
• Exhibitor events are full of vendors shouting about their informal, formal, social wiki, learning enterprise platform.
So what’s left? Where do I submit my software for independent, transparent review which can be trusted? And how could I get the PR required to get my software reviewed without resorting to hyperbole?
The bottom line is this: Given that there is an outside chance that my products could significantly alter your organisation for the better, how should vendors, like me, sell to buyers (or potential buyers), like you?
The Hierarchy of Acceptability and other mind farts.
I’ve just come back from holiday and whilst away I’ve developed a few thoughts that I thought I would share. Consider yourselves positively blessed. It’s a bit of a stream of consciousness, so forgive me, but I think it works better just getting this stuff down on the page!
Thought 1: The Hierarchy of Acceptability
Hierarchy of Acceptability
I’m sure someone will have documented this phenomenon before, but why is it that, socially speaking, we find some activities more acceptable than others? Who came up with the notion of “fresh air”? Is the air in my living room less ‘fresh’ than that in my front garden, next to the road? How is reading a book a more socially acceptable past-time than interacting with my friends online? Is it really as simple as a lack of understanding, or is it something deeper?
For many people, the notion that kicking a ball around is somehow ‘better’ than playing a computer game is common sense. I can’t see the sense in it at all.
Thought 2: The Underpants Gnomes and Cumulative Advantage
Underpants Gnomes
If you haven’t seen the Underpants Gnomes episode of South Park, shame on you. It’s a nice little skit taking on the business models of web 2.0 enterprises. The fundamental premise is this; Gnomes are stealing underpants as a part of their business strategy to get rich quick. Their plan comes in 3 stages. First steal the pants. In stage 2 something will happen (not sure what yet, doesn’t matter) and stage 3 is all profit. Sound familiar yet?
However, whilst I was away I read a bit on cumulative advantage, which suddenly legitimised the business model of every world dominating web 2.0 website. In the olden days it used to be that Cumulative Advantage was all about the rich getting richer. Money was the commodity and if you had a lot of it, you could pretty much rule the world. Of course the same holds true today. But what web 2.0 companies like Facebook, Twitter et al are doing is the same thing. They are just replacing the commodity – exchanging lots of money for lots of users, lots of tweets, lots of anything.
The principle is, if you can reach a critical mass in something which eventually proves to have value, you are laughing. Knowing what exactly people will choose to place value in is an entirely different story. But pants aren’t a bad start.
Thought 3: Why am I so bothered that I can’t come up with a 3rd point?
Nearly all of my postings come with a number of points. They are always odd numbers, 3 or 5 normally. Not being able to come up with a coherent third point for this post has really bothered me. If anyone knows anything academically about the rule of 3, I’d love to hear from you!
The problem with E-learning games
A little time ago I was presenting to a group of academics when I was posed a question which I really should have answered better than I did:
How do you define a game?
I trotted out something along the lines of objectives and rules, but I knew I’d copped out of the definition really. So I spent a bit of time researching and it turns out the question has been raised once or twice before. Who knew!
Of all the definitions I came across, one really stood out for me. Now I must preface this with the comment that I don’t necessarily agree with every element in the definition, but it is by far and away the best definition I’ve come across when trying to put games into context. Allow me to present, for your viewing pleasure, Chris Crawford’s Taxonomy of Creative Expressions:
Chris Crawford's Taxonomy of Creative Expression
Crawford’s taxonomy offers a simple to apply rule-set, but is written from the Video Game designer’s perspective. To suggest that all of the criteria above must be adhered to in order for a “game” to be created is perhaps too narrow a view. In fact, the weakest link in the suggested taxonomy comes first in my opinion; the contention that Creative Expression can be defined into that which is designed to make money or that which is simply used to create something beautiful. This is a large generalisation and one I would take issue with. Where Creative Expression is used to educate, entertainment can also be the result. Of course, education may eventually lead to money (whether in increased productivity to an individual or organisation, or into the trainers back-pocket), but then so may Art.
This aside, I think it’s brilliant. A little further explanation to the diagram perhaps…
Crawford identifies that where Entertainment includes Interactivity (stepping beyond videos, books and so on) we encounter “Playthings”. Where goals are included as a part of the Plaything a Challenge is created. Challenges played without Competition are defined as Puzzle’s. Typically, this is where the majority of E-learning games and interactions lie. Whilst many of these E-learning objects are goal orientated, they do not actively present a competitor for the user to play against. Crawford defines this competitor as “an active agent against whom you compete”. Where this agent is apparent we have defined a “Conflict”. Conflicts in which you cannot interfere with your opponent’s performance are defined as “Competitions”. This would typically be exemplified by a running race – you are competing, but you cannot directly influence your opponent’s ability to win. Where Interference is allowed, what Crawford defines as “attacks allowed”, the conflict becomes a Game.
So it is not until all of these criteria have been fulfilled that a true Game has been created. I’ve thus far struggled to come up with any piece of E-learning that I’ve seen meet these criteria. I think this definition perhaps helps to exemplify my issues with topics such as Second Life for E-learning. I’ve no problem with people using it, but calling it a game simply isn’t true. In most circumstances it is used purely for Entertainment purposes, with some interactions stretching it into a Plaything. The most ambitious examples of Second Life “games” I have seen stretch as far as puzzles. But this is no further than a typical “drag and drop” exercise on a web page would take us. It just looks different.
Equally important in Crawford’s definition for me is the idea of a “conflict” being necessary in order for a game to be created. Where competitors play each other in a teaching environment, it is common to see examples of co-operative play. That is, helping one-another to achieve the goals of the scenario. The video game world is the exact opposite of this; it is far more common to blow the heads off your opponents than it is to work with them to reach a common goal.
There are examples of where this is not the case, but overwhelmingly this is where teaching games and video games go their separate ways. Somewhere in the middle of this is E-learning.
I feel that, at the present time, we in the E-learning world are rather avoiding this issue by falling some way short of creating true “games” for learning online. I’m keen for examples to prove me wrong, so please do comment with anything that meets these requirements. In the meantime I’m off to research Game Theory – I feel the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” will be at the heart of my findings…
A first crack at my abstract for ALT-C submission
This year will be the first one which I aim to hit both conferences and journals in anger. ALT-C is a good place to start, not least because the closing deadline is soon! The theme of this years conference is “Into something rich and strange” – making sense of the sea change. I can’t help but feel that the whole nautical metaphor is somewhat let down by being held in Nottingham, but you can’t have it all!
I really wanted to put forward our Curatr software in a paper for the conference as I really believe it has great potential to change things quite radically, but I’m simply not going to have the quantitative or qualitative data required of a credible paper. What I do have however is the results of a project that has been running for just over a year near, A.C.E. the Adaptive Case Engine. This is a project we’ve been developing alongside Pearson Education and it has some great potential to knock down the barriers that stop complex simulations being created quickly and easily.
So with that in mind I’ve knocked together a short Abstract as my starting point for the paper. I realise I’m working backwards; it’s not the only work I’ve got in progress so it all makes perfect sense to me! This is all contributing towards my EngD, but I’ve been told on several occasions that the ability to get papers in at peer reviewed conferences (and perhaps even the ALT-J afterwards) will stand my doctorate in very good stead. So here goes nothing….
Abstract:
It has been established that three key issues, Time, Cost and Quality, constrain the capabilities of corporate E-learning initiatives. These factors are related and a frontier exists between them which constrains the characteristics of the E-learning. The limitations introduced by these factors have a direct effect on the overall success of E-learning implementations.
Simulations and games are attracting increased attention in corporate E-learning circles. The effectiveness of teaching games is thought to be high; however the cost and time of development is often restrictive. Recent surveys suggest that the average time to develop a complex simulation is around 800 hours. A new solution, designed to cut this development time whilst maintaining the quality required of a complex simulation, has been developed. The Adaptive Case Engine (ACE) allows for complex, adaptive case studies to be created “in the cloud” and then played either online or offline.
In order to test the effectiveness of our new solution, an initial prototype was developed using more traditional development methods. The development time for this project was circa 200 hours plus initial authoring time of around 40 hours. The same case study was subsequently developed within 3 hours using the new ACE system.
So what do you think? Want to know more? Would you read that paper?
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