"Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can." ~ Charles Handy Formal education moves at geological speeds, and that's lucky for us, because games for learning really aren't ready for prime time, and it's not for the first time. During the 'Edutainment Era' of the late 1980's and early 1990’s computer games were proclaimed as the modern solution to all our educational ills. In order to take advantage of this great technology, all we needed to do was wrap a game around a lesson, and it would magically become fun. This, of course, is not true, and the resultant...
Many M.Ed. programs claim to incorporate signature pedagogies in their programs, which often include approaches such as inquiry-based, case-based, and problem-based learning, communities of learners, and more. Teacher education is unique among disciplines in that we are doing what we are teaching. Metateaching has been defined as thinking about teaching (Timpson 1999), but if metacognition is thinking about thinking, and a meta-language is a language about languages, then metateaching is in fact teaching about teaching. If we combine this with notions of signature pedagogies and the idea that we should be modeling what we are teaching, then what does this mean at the graduate level? It...
In a recent online presentation Charles M. Reigeluth, he said that the future of Ed Tech would require a change of paradigm of pedagogy. Gamification is one such new pedagogy that can be implemented without the need for institutional systemic change. ‘Gamification’ is the use of game elements in non-game contexts and since the term’s first appearance in 2006, it has become a trending topic on many education forums. This presentation reports on the gamification of 2 university courses: one a grad-level education course and the other a freshman computer course. While many aspects of gamification are *not* new, some are, and when taken together create a pedagogy that could be one of...
Just what do we learn from playing serious games? Especially common in games for learning is the notion that participants need to be able to win the game, but is it always necessary for the player to win in order to ‘get’ our message? In his studies of productive failure, Kapur (2008) has suggested that failure can be important to learning. Indeed, when we think back on our most memorable learning experiences we often find that these lessons are things learned through failure rather than success. Learning through failure is an effective way to help people learn how to cope with situations where there is no clear solution (Dorner, et al., 1990), and for certain kinds of messages negative...
Videogames are interactive by nature - people proceed in games by doing things, and this experiential quality lies at the very core of game design. Without interaction, it isn’t a game. Videogames are popular precisely because of the experience - games designed for learning can do no less. However, to be feasible for use in formal educational settings, they must do more, and while we are making progress studying games in classrooms, there remain few structured approaches to analysing games that do not include classroom testing. This presentation will outline the author’s Four Pillars of Game-Based Learning and show using examples how they can be used to perform a structured analysis of...