Our workshop on creating learning environments in virtual worlds — trying to learn tricks from game developers — ended up providing, in itself, a spot lesson about user-centered design. Rather than tread the usual path of presentation \/ questions, we went for a participatory workshop. With that framework in place, we put ourselves at the mercy of our participants — the perils of practicing what you preach! Which is not to pat ourselves on the back — weak points of the workshop highlighted potential pitfalls of user-led experiences such as accommodating wide ranges of learning styles, knowledge, experience, and cultures (more on these later). Nonetheless, I think we were happy with the way the workshop ran despite several rough spots. I’m also satisfied with our real life \/ Second Life interface, though that wasn’t hitch-less either.<\/p>\n
As described earlier, our method was (1) to deconstruct successful games, running on the assumption that good games provide strong learning opportunities; (2) develop a set of principles of successful learning environments; (3) apply that framework to real-life examples, including a proposed project. Our starting hypothesis is that for teachers who are good at creating teacher-centered educational experiences, developing learner-centered experiences might be quite challenging.<\/p>\n
Some lessons learned that are applicable both to future conference workshops and, I hope, to learning experiences in general:<\/p>\n
1. Exploit small-group dynamics, but model them first.<\/strong> We started by playing the classic sequencing game (get yourselves in order of…) which assisted us into breaking into mixed-experience groups. But we squandered this effort by following up with a large-group activity that dissipated some of the early energy. We asked the entire group to identify factors in a game that they were familiar with that made them compelling experiences. While these questions were good, participants hewed to highly theoretical, general answers — most refused to give specific examples. Perhaps we should have modeled some of the answers ourselves. Then we might have had the small groups, rather than the whole group, answer a set of the posed questions, with narrow parameters for acceptable answers.<\/p>\n 2. Focus on practical, not theoretical, activities.<\/strong> We should have played more games as object lessons for the session. Scot started us out with tic-tac-toe, which he used as an illustration of how games get us into a different zone even when the game is so simplistic. We probably could have teased that out more, and perhaps pulled some activities out of Rules of Play<\/em>, especially since we couldn’t require participants to read Jim Gee and Raph Koster in advance. In any event, it was unrealistic to expect that we could develop a framework from scratch in the span of 1 hour. Better to do 3 spot lessons and then move on to the next phase.<\/p>\n 3. Problem-solving is fun:<\/strong> Any game designer can tell you that! I think our case study was really the best part of the morning — each group went at it with some level of seriousness, though maybe not as much gusto as I might have hoped (see next lesson). We ended up with some really good responses. I think it was also at this phase that the Second Life participants got really into it (see lesson 5).<\/p>\n 4. Culture matters.<\/strong> I could detect some pretty serious variance in individual participation even at the small-group level, and I attribute it to a combination of language, culture, and knowledge differences. There’s not much we could have done about the knowledge differentials, but I suspect we could have done more to have eased the group dynamics around language and culture. I noticed that most of the groups — about 10 people each — had only about half actively participating.<\/p>\n 5. Let virtual participants actually do something.<\/strong> I think this is where we fell down in the first half — a large-group discussion just didn’t lend itself to Second Life participation. It’s also where the workshop shone — giving the SL participants a task was a great way to get them involved, and so we should have done the same for group discussion.<\/p>\n I will try to post pictures and video of this event as they become available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our workshop on creating learning environments in virtual worlds — trying to learn tricks from game developers — ended up providing, in itself, a spot lesson about user-centered design. Rather than tread the usual path of presentation \/ questions, we went for a participatory workshop. With that framework in place, we put ourselves at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[870],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cyber-pedagogy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/vvvv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}