The New Media Consortium hosted an online conference on educational gaming last week (November 7 & 8, 2005). I was privileged enough to attend. Posting a few thoughts about what I saw, heard, and yes, learned would be useful to organize my thoughts and also share these ideas with anyone interested.
- The educational model of gaming, particularly Massively Multiplayer Online (Roll Playing) Games (MMO[RP]G), is about motivating learners, training learners, and helping educators better understand the processes of peer support and social aspects of learning.
- Many claim that processes lend themselves to the educational game arena better than content heavy subjects. IOW, the process of how to dissect a frog might be a better candidate for a game than learning the names of the frog’s organs. I have my doubts whether or not this is true. Many games seem to have the capacity to help learn or motivate us to practice content heavy subjects. And who is to say where content ends and process begins?
- There are at least three main methods for bringing games into a curriculum: 1. a commercial game that is useful to the subject matter (e.g. Doom has been used in military training). 2. a commercial game that is useful to build community (e.g. World of Warcraft for collective work towards a single goal). 3. developing a game yourself (or with IT help) that specifically addresses your instructional needs (e.g. yet to be released Ancient Spaces). These were the main ones, but our pedagogical imagination is the true limitation here.
The future seems wide open with possibilities. I’ll need to look into more titles to see if currently available selections could be of use to those in
