Mission

In the ComETS GAME DESIGN group, we will try to model what we investigate. So, we’ll be doing playful hands-on research/investigation, and application/testing of what we find.

Objectives

• host a 90-minute meeting twice a month
• deconstruct compelling games that require a lot of cognitive work (and/or busywork, or “grinding”)
• figure out what makes them compelling
• apply that magic formula to various coursework situations
• share results with peers/colleagues

Please email johnmartin@wisc.edu for more information.

“We developed this publishing system (at great cost, no doubt), and are willing to give it away for free to anyone who would like to use it to create and freely distribute cool eTexts. If you want to profit from it (industries), we’re taking 30% to cover the cost of continued development of this and other cool tools. If you’re just looking for an easy-to-use, and elegant tool for getting your knowledge out to the world for free (schools, non-profits, self-publishing authors), you’re welcome to use it for free.”

Unlike the status quo method of paying for software, Apple is not requiring an upfront payment. Consider the model behind Adobe’s DPS, to use it for a one-off publication costs $395 (plus Adobe Creative Suite 5.5, plus a suitable computer that runs the software). Then you’re allowed to profit from that one-off as much as you can with no extra fees, right? Apple flips that around and says that iBooks Author is free to use (plus cost of suitable computer that runs the software) to create dynamic iBooks content that looks and runs amazing on their iOS — but also as a pretty decent PDF creator that displays (non-dynamic content) well on any browser.

I also bet we’ll see people “trying out” (prototyping) ideas for books here — something they might not have had the where-with-all to even approach before and if they think they’ve got a hit might decide to either publish with Apple or reformat with some other system to sell for more than 70% profit.

But for not-for-profit uses, it seems okay. For example, the director of a senior center might want residents actively engaged in creating a legacy artifact for their children, but don’t have the publishing expertise to pull them through the process? This seems like a fabulous tool for seniors to pretty easily publish a cool autobiography or family lineage book. They wouldn’t (typically) want to sell it to their family, but would want it to be cool enough to engage the next generation.

• You say that you’re a non-profit community health organization that wants to get good-looking, easy-to-read health information out free to your clients, but can’t afford Adobe?
• You say that you’re a teacher who wants to create course readers or study guides for your course, but don’t want to force your students to  buy textbooks?
• You say that you’re a graduate student, passionate about your research, but suspicious of the journal system, and you’d like to get your research into the hands of as many people as possible?

If you want to profit from it, and manage to do so, then you pay.

It’s a private version of a tax system – i.e. as a citizen (user), you’re free to use services (Fire, Police, etc.) as long as you don’t profit from them. If you profit from it, there’s a 30% tax to subsidize services for those who don’t. It’s definitely a bold shift from the status quo of software. But terrible? I don’t know yet.

Community Gardens near me.

Local Food Systems Scenario: Players locate and map where food comes from in their neighborhood. Dairy farms? Community garden plots? Organic Farms and CSA? Canneries? Egg farms? Beef farms? Cabbage? Cranberries? Orchards? Processing plants?

Play: In the map to the right, I’ve outlined in red the community garden plots near me. For going over to them and walking around both sets, I’d get some points, similar to the UNM game Chris Holden created. If I became an expert on the locations of the other community gardens in my city, I’d earn some sort of badge. If I learned more by interviewing some of the gardeners about what they’re growing (and why), and sharing that in the game, I’d earn some further expertise points. I could add restaurants that use local food as well. The game is limited only by what the quests are, and in this game, I can challenge — and accept challenges — from other players, so there really is no limit.

Basically, I have a notion that if we got together with a few interested peers and students/PAs, we could come up with a really interesting interdisciplinary place-based field experience that offered multiple quests at multiple levels of expertise (ala “I’ll take Botany for 200, Alex”) that could be replicated in different areas across the state (and country). Although my initial thoughts center on using ARIS, they only extend as far as using ARIS as a prototyping tool — the actual game might end up in a number of different formats for different technologies.

My goals are these. I’ve been passionate about place-based/embodied learning for decades, and am now in a position where I’ve got access to cool folks and cool tools (Google Maps and ARIS, etc.), and a job where I can finally start to coordinate the creation of something amazing that combines them all. My big evil scheme is to get smart  brains in one whiteboard-filled room, and let ideas cross-pollinate. I imagine a large scalable tour/game/field experience with new quests/activities being continually added as they’re developed.

If we build a structure/frame together, it will be easier to add components individually, as needs/resources arise. And we can recruit players by luring them from other quests (i.e. I’ve played the Astronomy Quest, and like this activity — maybe I’ll try out the Ecology Quest to supplement my points!)

I have no doubt that players would quickly find that many skills overlap from discipline to discipline. So if I kicked butt in and really enjoyed a Probability sub-quest in the Botany line of quests, I might want to jump over an rip through some Probability sub-quests in the Language line of quests (e.g. um… probability of multi-vowel adjacency in billboard ads in Wisconsin?).

The GLS Conference is the premier event in the field of videogames and learning. Now in its eighth year, this grassroots “indie” event is evolving to include more innovative content formats and new programming. The GLS Conference is one of the few destinations where the people who create high- quality digital learning media can gather for serious discussion about what is happening in the field and how the field can serve the public interest. Our event is well known for its exceptionally high quality of content yet “community event” feel. Each year, we foster in-depth conversation and social networking across diverse disciplines including game studies, education research, learning sciences, industry, government, educational practice, media design, and business. Our continued commitment is to reinvent learning both in and out of formal school environments through the promise of games and simulations.

Conference highlights include: keynotes by leaders in both academics and industry; interactive workshops on game research and game design; both individual and symposia presentation sessions; big debates about critical aspects of gaming and game design; hands‐on game play in the arcade; the “hall of failure”; a massively multi-player evening poster session over cocktails & hors d’oeuvres; fireside chats that enable cozy conversations among speakers and attendees; and the GLS Games and Art Exhibition. A new session type offered this year will be the Educational Game Arcade, which will offer a space for conference attendees to play the games created by members of our community.

Confirmed speakers include:

• COLLEEN MACKLIN
• REED STEVENS
• SEBASTIAN DETERDING

We offer a variety of session formats, encouraging submissions from traditional paper presentations to innovative formats focusing on game play. All submissions are due online by January 31, 2012. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site at http://glsconference.org as well as more information about the GLS Educators Symposium and the GLS Doctoral Consortium.

I was reading “Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework” (PDF) from Wenger (the “Communities of Practice” guy) and his colleagues, and came across this section on the value, danger, and challenge of communities and networks for learning. Its application to my work is timely as we reassess our goals and priorities, and plan for another year both as a community of learners and as a sort of glue in networks on campus and beyond. It doubly applies in our consulting, outreach, and practice as a “teaching and learning arm” of DoIT — these are the latest nuggets in Sociocultural Learning Theory, and although it largely echoes much of what Dewey, Vygotsky, Wertsch, etc. have been saying forever, it does so pretty clearly here.

It’s a 60 page paper, but here’s an excerpt:

Learning and community

The formation of a community creates a social space in which participants can discover and further a learning partnership related to a common domain. This partnership can be formal or informal and its intention can be explicit or tacit. The key characteristic is the blending of individual and collective learning in the development of a shared practice.

The learning value of community derives from the ability to develop a collective intention to advance learning in a domain. This shared commitment to a domain and to the group of people who care about it is a learning resource. It tends to make information flows relevant. Over time, a joint history of learning also becomes a resource among the participants in the form of a shared practice – a shared repertoire of cases, techniques, tools, stories, concepts, and perspectives.

The danger of community is that it can become hostage to its history, its established ways of doing things, and the attendant identification with the group. When that happens, communities can become losed and inward-focused; boundaries stiff and impermeable; and past successes a blinder to new possibilities.

The challenge of community is that it requires sustained identification and engagement. Negotiating and renegotiating a reason to learn together, helping each other, following up on ideas, developing shared resources, sustaining a social space for learning – all this requires time and commitment. Note veryone has to have the same level of commitment, but there has to be enough for the community to feel alive as an entity.

Learning and network

The connections in a network can function as learning ties providing access to information flows and exchanges. This access can be intentional or serendipitous. It can be direct – involving a personal connection, or indirect – involving a series of connections. Participation in a network does not require a sustained learning partnership or a commitment to a shared domain. In this sense, learning in a network does not have to have an explicit collective dimension.

The learning value of network derives from access to a rich web of information sources offering multiple perspectives and dialogues, responses to queries, and help from others – whether this access is initiated by the learner or by others. On the one hand, because of personal connections, networking helps target access to learning resources – whether one sends an email query to a friend or decides to follow someone’s twitter feed. On the other hand, because information flows can be picked up, interpreted, and propagated in unexpected ways, they traverse networks with a high level of spontaneity and unpredictability. This potential for spontaneous connections and serendipity – and the resulting potential for collective exploration without collective intention or design – is a key aspect of the value of networks for learning.

The danger of network is noise and diffusion. Connectivity as a learning resource has its price. Expanding connectivity increases the chance of useful access, but it also increases the level of “noise.” And while networking does not require a commitment to a communal domain, it does require maintenance of connections and the ability to distinguish between significance and noise. At the collective level, the strength of networks in enabling serendipity and emergent behaviors has a flipside: the absence of collective intention and identity makes it more difficult to steward a domain systematically. When connections remain largely local important insights can remain hidden because there is no intention to recognize and negotiate their importance through the mobilization of a committed group.

The challenge of network is that it requires a strong sense of direction on the part of individuals. Learning takes place as participants leverage the availability and spread of information to pursue enterprises they care about and develop their ability to do so. The value of networks as learning resources depends on an individual to act as responsible nodes and evaluate the relevance of information flows for themselves and for the broader network.

More here (PDF).

Markermusic.com is one of the coolest place-centric mashups of user production that I’ve seen. Wow.

The idea is simply to record a riff based on another riff, ala the famous YouTube video inbflat.net project.

Oh here, let me steal their explanation —

marker/music is an interactive sound and music map created by Darren Solomon, the students and faculty of Northern State University, and members of the community of Aberdeen, South Dakota. From October 18th – 22nd, 2010, the group shot over 70 videos in the area, from which 12 were chosen to be embedded in a custom Google map. The project was inspired by Darren’s inbflat.net, and is intended to explore the concept by producing the entire project locally in a single community, rather than through internet-based crowdsourcing.

<— And here’s the inbflat.net project.

It's Sorry and Parcheesi played outside as fast as you can run!

If you’ve not already read about in the Daily Page or on MacArthur’s Digital Media Spotlight, on April 18-20, we held our first “Global” ARIS jam. There were over a hundred participants from Columbia, the Netherlands, and Spain, and the U.S. including folks from the Minnesota Historical Society, 3M, Oregon Middle School, Whitewater Middle School, Oconomowoc School District, Middleton Alternative Senior High, University of New Mexico Albuquerque, University of Northern Colorado, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Parsons The New School of Design, University of Murcia, consultants from WiseGuys and IdeaMonkey Inc. And in the ensuing 50 hours of work, folks created 127 games (not counting the ones we made in the workshop!).

Pretty Cool, huh?

I held four ARIS workshops in that time. One for the opening group and three for high school and university classes that dropped by. Between teaching workshops and roaming the amazing Wisconsin Idea room in the UW-Madison Education building (thanks for hosting, SoE!!) helping participants work through design logic, I was only able to make one game ———>>>>

Adobe Connect slogged whenever we had more than 9-10 feeds.

Nonetheless, we were mentally and physically exhausted afterwards, and we learned a whole lot about creating interactive place-based experiences for learning through play.

Consider this excerpt:

Psychologists have determined that an “I Designed It Myself Effect” exists in mass customization, where buyers feel a sense of accomplishment from their co-design efforts. Buyers gain additional value from the certainty that features will be exactly what they want. And they can express themselves with public goods (such as clothing, cars, jewelry, or even PCs) that reflect their unique design. Ultimately, these psychological benefits translate into a higher willingness to pay into loyal, repeat-purchasing customers.

Now apply that thinking to schools, and the role of education. What would a sense of ownership and design of their own education give learners? How would classes look if students were allowed to center their learning and exploration of new topics and processes around their pre-existing knowledge, where they start out as experts in x (their interests and passions), and venture into the areas they recognize that they need to also learn?

Technology makes customization of learning entirely possible and easy — if only we agree to adjust our teaching practices to allow it.

Via: Voxy Blog