Group items tagged

Game designer Marc LeBlanc has defined eight types of fun: sense-pleasure, make-believe, drama, obstacle, social framework, discovery, self-discovery and expression, and surrender. Paul Ekman, a researcher on emotions and facial expressions, has identified literally dozens of different emotions - it’s interesting to see how many of them only exist in one language but not in others. Nicole Lazzaro did some studies watching people play games, and she arrived at four clusters of emotion represented by the facial expressions of the players: hard fun, easy fun, altered states, and the people factor.

Games are not stories. It is interesting to make the comparison, though: Games tend to be experiential teaching. Stories teach vicariously. Games are good at objectification. Stories are good at empathy. Games tend to quantize, reduce, and classify. Stories tend to blur, deepen, and make subtle distinctions. Games are external - they are about people’s actions. Stories (good ones, anyway) are internal - they are about people’s emotions and thoughts. In both cases, when they are good, you can come back to them repeatedly and keep learning something new. But we never speak of fully mastering a good story.

In the example below, the user interface is an elevator panel. Learners choose a floor on the panel, ride up to the selected floor and partake in learning activities on each floor. As they climb higher in the building, the activities become more advanced. The elevator panel on the left doesn’t correspond to a typical mental model of how an elevator works. When the user realizes that going up to a higher level lesson is represented as going down the elevator, it’s confusing. When we stick to conventions, as shown in the example on the right, we’re modeling the way most people think.

Cook until visible learning, engagement and interactivity emerge.

What I have found is teaching presence not only occurs in a face to face classroom but also online, if you look at it, they kind of are the SAME thing. The online platform is the classroom; we shouldn’t change it to make it suitable for online, we should do just as we would if it was face to face.