Best e-Learning Blog that isn’t an e-Learning Blog

I follow a whole lot of e-Learning blogs, and they typically cover topics like web 2.0, social media for learning, e-Learning technology, the state of the industry, etc.  Once in a while, they do tackle interesting, chewy e-Learning design questions (but not as often as I could wish for).

Where I do consistently find conversations about interesting, chewy e-Learning design questions is on Gamasutra - a gaming industry blog.  Few, if any, of those articles are actually about e-Learning (and, according to Patrick Dunn, they are on the other side from e-Learning, separated by a huge and uncrossable chasm.”).

Gamasutra does also cover topics like the industry, tools, etc., but they also have amazing things to say about e-Learning design.  Here are some of the best examples:

• Funativity: Want to learn about how to motivate learners to engage with your e-Learning?

• Boss Design: Trial & Punishment: Want to learn about rigorous evaluation for e-Learning?  Work on your boss fight.

• Rethinking Carrots: A New Method For Measuring What Players Find Most Rewarding and Motivating About Your Game: How do you handle motivation and rewards in your e-Learning?

• Behavioral Game Design: It’s all about the feedback.

• Gamer Archetypes and Lack of Authorial Control: Just tweeted this today — how much control do you allow your learners?  Is their experience push or pull?  What about Social Media in learning?

• Achievement Design 101: Are your learner able to achieve in your learning?

• Creating the Illusion of Accomplishment: Are your learner able to accomplish in your learning? (I blogged about this here)

• Persuasive Games: And you should read pretty much all of Ian Bogost’s columns on persuasive games. Really.

Frequently, Gamasutra does deal explicitly with games for learning, and it’s a beautiful thing:

• Learning by Design: Games as Learning Machines: by James Paul Gee, the Jedi Master of Games for Learning

• Learning to Play to Learn – Lessons in Educational Game Design: by Nick Fortugno & Eric Zimmerman

• Proof of Learning: Assessment in Serious Games by Sande Chen

(This more or less goes with my previous post about the Acagamic – another great site about e-Learning that isn’t about e-Learning.  Go there too).

Holiday Present from the Acagamic

Dave Ferguson already called attention to this over on his blog, but I’m going to do it here also.

One of my favorite new-to-me blogs is The Acagamic – Usable Game Science, and it’s marvelous stuff.  As a special holiday present, the blog is featuring a series of presentations on things game-y:

As a Christmas special, I will for once update this blog daily for the next 24 days with my favorite presentation slides about games, user experience, game design, emotion, affective and entertainment computing, etc.

The first one is here: http://www.acagamic.com/specials/advent-2009/1-virtual-goods-how-and-why-they-work/

Collect one!  Collect them all!

BJ Fogg on Simplicity

Is it weird to admit I have a huge professional crush on BJ Fogg?

(via http://johnnyholland.org/)

Submit a Case Study to LEEF 2010!

Hey folks,

Last June I presented at the very first Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF)  in Harrisburg, PA.  The forum was put on by the fabulous folks at the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology.  Can’t say enough good things about them — they are really trying to do it right.

Currently the call is out for Case Study sessions on topics related games and simulations in learning (the case study format is one of the real strengths of the forum).  If you are doing something interesting, consider submitting a proposal (details below). If you have any questions about it, feel free to ping me.

Here’s the invite:

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You and your team are doing some great work with games and simulations for learning and performance improvement!  Are you presenting the results of your work at industry conferences?  If not, you should be.  You can help advance the effort to make organizational learning more engaging and more impactful by sharing your experiences with others. I suggest you submit a case study proposal for LEEF 2010 – an event that focuses on profiling case studies in games, simulations and virtual worlds.

The Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum (LEEF) will take place in Harrisburg, PA on June 17-18, 2010.  In addition to keynotes, high-tech demos and workshops, one aspect that makes the forum so beneficial is the degree of interactivity and the depth of analysis that is provided through the two-hour case studies. Case study sessions present best practices in game, simulation and virtual world learning initiatives, and analyze innovative uses of technologies in which learning and entertainment goals converge.  This year’s theme will focus on practical steps for overcoming barriers to adoption related to organizational, design, and technical challenges.

Proposals for case study sessions are being accepted now through December 21. You can learn more about the event and the case study proposal process online at:  http://www.harrisburgu.edu/LEEF2010/case-studies.php.

Start Seeing Games: 10 Examples of Games that Overlap with Life

A number of years ago I read Chaos by James Gleick, and afterwards couldn’t help but see fractals everywhere.

Now, I’ve been interested in the application of games in learning environments for years — specifically the fundamentals of game design (points, leveling, challenge, achievements, collecting, etc.), and lately I’ve been seeing game thinking everywhere I look, particularly how games overlap with life (or vice versa).  I have a post brewing (promises, promises) on why I think this is interesting, and what some potential applications for learning are, but I thought in the mean time, I would do a round-up of the most interesting ones:

• #1: Starting with the most awesome: Game Designer Jane McGonigal blogs about turning her slow and difficult recovery from a concussion injury into a Buffy-based game called SuperBetter.  She recruited friends and family to help her quest as Jane the Concussion Slayer.  http://blog.avantgame.com/2009/09/super-better-or-how-to-turn-recovery.html

• #2: Wendy Wickham at her blog, In the Middle of the Curve, talks about applying the game structure of immediate, short, medium and long-term goals to fitness.  http://in-the-middle-of-the-curve.blogspot.com/2009/08/thoughts-on-goals.html

• #3: Brenda Brathwaite has a list of achievements for GameDevDiet-the Game. There are lots of good suggestions in the comments, too.  http://bbrathwaite.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/gamedevdiet-the-game/

• #4: I linked previously to a post about the idea of Barely Games from Russell Davies in the last post, but I’m going to do it again (it’s that great). He talks about interacting with the world in a game-like way, and how that can be much more evocative that aggressively over-designed game experiences.  http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2009/11/playful.html

• #5: I first encountered the game Noticings (the game of noticing the world around you) on the CogDogBlog.  He points out that part of the allure of the game is that “there may be hidden rules, that can only be discovered by earning them” http://cogdogblog.com/2009/11/04/noticings/

• #6: Apparently no less than David Byrne of the Talking Head plays Barely Games with his world, or at least at his local IKEA: http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2007/11/11032007-social.html

• #7: Harry Lee is an Australian teenager who created a “Sneaky Card” game – his game board is his immediate world, and the cards that draw people into the game are surreptitious and can potentially spread outwards indefinitely.  http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/22/digital-open-winners-4.html

• #8: This hour-long video of Amy Jo Kim doing a Google Tech Talk is excellent primer on applying game mechanics – she’s specifically talking about how to apply game mechanics to functional software (eBay, Twitter, etc.) but what she’s talking about can be applied to learning applications (ILT or e-Learning). It’s the same ideas that are cropping up in applications like Foursquare.  Highly recommended:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUt-163gZI

• #9: Speaking of Twitter games, here’s one from @bfchirpy called Skinner (yep – it helps if you are big ed psych geek): http://rtbc.tumblr.com/post/240089374/the-game-of-skinner

• #10: Infovore raises a lot of good points about game interaction, and specifically references the idea that the dash display of a Toyota Prius turns driving into a game of how-many-mpg-can-I-get: http://infovore.org/talks/if-gamers-ran-the-world/

So, I’m sure I missed dozens of good examples.  Which ones have you seen?

Play a Game with Mundane Imagination

I’ve been reading The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell (which is wonderful), and there was a passage about imagination that I thought was really remarkable:

Imagination puts the player into the game by putting the game into the player.

You might think, when I talk about the power of the players’s imagination that I might mean their creative imagination, and the power to make up dreamlike fantasy worlds — but I am talking about something more mundane.  The imagination I’m talking about is the miraculous power that everyone takes for granted — the everyday imagination that every person uses for communication and problem solving. (p. 124)

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What does this look like?

He goes on to give the example of a story:

“The mailman stole my car yesterday.”

Take a minute and run the movie of that story in your head.  What do you see?

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Schell talks about the fact that you can picture the story — if asked, you can probably describe the mailman and the car, and the scene where it happens, including time of day, the weather, the color of the car.  You can even start assigning motives to the mailman, and describe the consequences of what happens next.  You didn’t need to be told any of that, and you don’t even need to work that hard to see it — most of it appears nearly effortlessly (it’s not the effortful kind of thinking we associate with creative design).

This ability to automatically fill gaps is very relevant for game design, for it means that our games don’t need to give every detail, and players will be able to fill in the rest.  The art comes in knowing what you should show the player, and what you should leave to their imagination. (p. 125)

Picture an Armchair

Schell talks about how amazing this power of imagination is, and how incredibly flexible it is.  For example, imagine an armchair (another of Schell’s examples).

• Now imagine that it’s very large.

• Now imagine that it’s bright orange.

• Now imagine that it’s made of oatmeal.

• Now image that it’s walking around the room.

The fact that you can change your inner vision of the chair, largely effortlessly, is miraculous and mundane at the same time.

Barely Games

I thought of all of this when @bfchirpy sent me a link today for this posting from Russell Davies:

http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2009/11/playful.html

He talks about the idea of Barely Games – experiences that come from interacting with the world around you in a game-like way.  His games seem to have a game-like intent without the rigid structure.  He explains that the rules for these games are ambiguous, and that ambiguity is part of the experience (read the whole post – it’s worth it).

He talks about the role of Everyday Pretending in Barely Games, and explains that:

“Everyday Pretending is something you do with a bit of your brain, with the edges. It’s a thing of inattention, not concentration.”

What do you see?

I usually try to make sure that my blog posts have a lot of visuals, but I didn’t this time, because I didn’t want to interrupt your own mundane imagination when you were reading this.  I also usually try to include ideas for how to apply the topic to learning design, but I’m not going to do that either.

Here’s why — I want to you take something you are working on at present (a project or task – whatever it might be), and picture it.  Now, as gently as you possibly can (without regard for practical constraints – in the same way you can picture an armchair walking around a room), picture that project/task/work as a game.

What does it look like?

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(if you feel like playing, describe what you see in the comments)

ID Webcomic in Spanish!

So, the other day I got asked if it was okay to make a Spanish version of the the first ID Webcomic.  If you are curious, here it is:

How cool is that!

Why are people so dumb? (Cognitive Biases)

Bob Sutton (author of the excellent Hard Facts on evidence-based management, and other books) has had a few great posts recently on intuition, self-knowledge and cognitive bias (among other things):

• In Flawed Self-Evaluations he talks about people’s tendencies to overestimate their own knowledge or skill, and that the less they know about an area, the more they overestimate their abilities.

• In Intuition vs. Data-Drive Decision-Making he addresses the question about when you should follow intuition and when you should base your decisions on concrete evidence, and about the kind of cognitive biases (confirmation bias and the fallacy of centrality) that can cause intuition to be wrong.

While not directly tied to instructional design, cognitive bias is inevitably going to come into play whenever a learning experience requires a change of attitude or behavior, or a the acquisition of very foreign information or ideas.

Also, the List of Cognitive Biases is one of the most entertaining wikipedia pages going:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

While Sutton’s discussion of these issues is insightful and balanced, in other venues the discussion of cognitive biases seems to have the persistent theme “Why are people so dumb?”

I’ve been considering lately the notion that most cognitive biases have roots in functional behaviors. In the same way that optical illusions are interesting not just because they are wacky or mind-bending, but because they reveal things to us about how the brain is adapting or interpreting the visual world, cognitive distortions are interesting in that they make explicit and visible the cognitive shorthand that we are using to interpret the world all the time.

I think it’s primarily an efficiency of the brain — if we couldn’t automate some (or even the majority) of our decision-making, we’d never be able to get things done with any efficiency (similar to the phenomena that Antonio Damasio described around the difficulty of decision making in the absence of emotion).

The disconnect shows up when those automated patterns of thinking become calcified or lazy, or when the thought pattern is so ingrained that it’s completely transparent to the individual.

Similar to the idea from evolutionary psychology that an attraction to foods with high caloric density (sugar or fats) once conveyed an evolutionary advantage, but now work against us in our food-abundant societies, it seems like many cognitive biases have functional roots when applied in the right context.  Further, it might be useful to identify those contexts, to be better able to understand where those same behaviors are then misapplied.

With a number of cognitive biases, it’s fairly easy to hypothesize a context where that behavior could be valuable (the fallacy of centrality, for example — in most cases, people are probably *right* to think that if something was going on, they’d know about it, and if this couldn’t use this mental shorthand, they would be hopelessly mired in detail or wild goose chases).

I’m particularly intrigued by the cognitive distortion described in the Flawed Self-Evaluations post. The prevalence of the inflated self-view (majority of people believing that they are above-average intelligence or better than average drivers, etc. – all statistical impossibilities) makes me wonder if there isn’t some functional basis for those beliefs (although it could be as simple as needing to protect one’s self-esteem, or statistical illiteracy).

The question remains — what to do about it? Evidence-based management is definitely one key tool to check against intuition or habit. Sutton’s description of people who “act on their beliefs, while doubting what they know” is very useful. But because the behaviors are so automated, it becomes particular difficult for people to recognize and question them. It might be useful to have some predefined criteria that triggers specific analytical activities to guard against it. Some people (as Sutton describes) seem to do it naturally, but the rest of us may need to define implementation intentions for our own behavior (If I find myself doing X, I will sit down and do Y).

In instructional settings, it’s useful to consider what biases might exist already in your audience, and to keep an eye out for evidence that these biases are occurring. It can also be useful to make learners aware of their own biases, and teach them skills that allow them to look out for them (I found this nifty confirmation bias game when I was looking for resources for this post).

But I think one of the most useful things to keep in mind is that there are real reasons why this biases exist, and that it’s not obtuseness or stubbornness when you encounter them in your learners.

After all, which of us haven’t had the experience where you were absolutely certain you were right, had no reservations about expressing your *rightness*, and then found later you were…um…yeah…completely wrong?

Added note:  Related material about Dysrationalia turned up just today here and here.

Nerdiest Halloween Costume Ever?

Need a Halloween costume in less than 5 minutes?  Go as a Whiteboard!  Follow the instructions below:

1. Get a white t-shirt and markers
2. Draw stuff like this on the t-shirt
3. Put it on

Bonus step: Leave the back blank, take markers with you, and make it interactive.

Happy Halloween, folks.

ID Webcomic #2 – Um…”Accelerated” Learning

An example of this? Or maybe just my slightly grumpy response

to the over-extrapolation here.