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I’ve managed to get to a few webinar sessions recently where people have been talking about ‘game based learning’. I’ve had even more emails from teachers about it – where to start, what to use etc., and it seems the winds of change in ‘edutopia’ are increasingly blowing in favour of using digital games in the classroom.

I’ll gloss over the soap-box, suffice to say there is – and has been – a wealth of evidence that adopting ‘gameful’ learning with technology has benefits in blended learning. Having said that, developing sound pedagogical design around any game is not as simple as it may first appear.

Yes games develop pretty much all the 21C skills we talk about (I think gamers will learn pretty much all they need without ‘learning’, just ‘playing’) but they don’t readily wrap around the tragically common ideology of education – learning by absorption. Games and Virtual Worlds crossover, some lack narrative making them more motivating others have clear objectives and sequences (just like life). Using games still requires considered alignment of outcome, activity and assessment. In games of course, they usually come with all three in a flurry of graphics, sound and immersive action. Attempting to graft Call of Duty into a History class is likely to achieve nothing, apart from the horror of parents and administrators.

To use games well, you have to understand them well – so see how they are constructed, how levels work, how the story builds. You have to sink time into them – especially if you want to become part of the sub-cultures that they create. I can’t tell you about Aion unless you play Aion, just as a movie and never replicate the motivation and immersion of a mmo – where you are the director.

In many cases you have to think how to adapt it to a new teaching strategy – and develop new resources as well as assessment. The tools needed are more complex (Blender, Unity3D, Linden Script) that hacking out another Ning; and the teaching methods need to be adapted from existing models such as scenario based or project based learning. It is worth the effort however, but it is hard. I don’t want to pour water on the fire – just to point out that the authors of new curricula online, are increasingly drifting away from earlier blogs, podcasts and wikis – and increasingly interested in the development of virtual worlds and adaptation of games, consoles and devices.

Games are perhaps being brought into focus by new devices and immersive technical developments. Increasing access to software such as Unity3D for free, or the maturation of online tutorials to learn other free Open Source development tools for meshing and object building – Blender, Scratch, SketchUp etc. and spaces to use them – Open Sim, Hyper Grid etc, with new viewers and new communities such as KoinUp.

The world is playing casual games on Facebook … social games are on consoles, hell even facebook is on consoles – and yet despite all of this – we still theorise and debate ‘games’. Immersive learning is motivating and is cultural. They rapidly achieve ‘collective action’, when many blogging communities in school barely allow communication. Be carefull about the the linguistic interpretations of talking about game-based. Both games and enquiry based is alien DNA still. Treat a game like a great novel you and run around in or bring to life. Use it’s components to augment what it is you are trying to teach – but most of all – look past blogs, wikis and podcasts and learn about avatars.

And one last note – Unlike Wikis, ‘game based’ is going to take much longer, so as exciting at is appears, game-based presents more reasons to churn than Web2.0. But that’s no reason not to try.

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Good Reads is a free online community that reviews and talks about books. Nothing new in that perhaps, but interestingly, this one has a number of teacher-friendly features that make it a good option for schools. If you must have a walled garden, then this is an internet site – so you can’t block out other groups or books that don’t suit you. But, if you are a teacher who wants students to encounter books, then basing class inside Good Reads might be fertile ground.

They have included the public/private groups of course, so it’s a cinch to set up a class group. Here’s a high school group for example. It is also a social network (another exit point for some) – but it allows students to put in reviews of books, see other reviews, add to a shelf of books to read etc. It also allows some collaboration, in that you can compare reviews. If you are modelling writing, this would be a great way to compare several styles. Good books is not just a fan site – and much of what I’ve explored has very well constructed reviews and discussions. Many books have role-play groups set up around a book, and well worth looking into. Imagine if young people are going to role play in a book-forum, how well this could be augmented in a virtual world!.

Communication and interest – the first two levels of community building – can be well served here I think. Building a literacy or writing class in the middle of Good Reads is probably going to see students encounter more than the class text. There are hundreds of young adult and school groups in Good Reads – and many are open to having more members than just their class. I’ve only just started using it to look for recommendations, but have found that it’s functionality and ease of use makes it a good companion service, and certainly offers the functionality most classes need.

Online communities – are now a  culture or counter-culture depending on your ideology. Community, culture, churn, sift and drift are the reagents of motivation and at the center of learning anything online.

Communities need culture to operate. Anyone talking about communities in an online world, cannot dismiss its cultural influences. This is however a ver spikey idea – especially to people who prefer the world the way as it was.  Big communities are more robust. In times of stress, they spin off into smaller ones rather than shattering. They are easy for newcomers to join, so you spend less time recruiting as there’s always room for one more. They are very attractive to socializers who seem to prefer their inclusive feel. Small communities are fast to develop, the community levels faster (I think there are 4 stages to community: communication, interest, practice and collective action). Small communities are more personal-friendly to newcomers. They tend to be more diverse in their interests and are far more exclusive. Explorers, risk takers and innovators prefer them.

They all suffer from churn, sink and drift.

Churn is the rate people leave. The stronger the community, the less churn. (schools auto-churn students every year). Most of the churn happens in the newcomer days: It’s too hard, I don’t have time, it’s not me etc., A good way to manage churn rates is to offer a trial (as in 10 days game play for nothing). This acts as safety value to ensure the community is not determined by the churn. The community does not want people who can’t strengthen it and are willing for give up revenue and size for this. Much of education is fixated on cost and size, so actually promotes churn. Education is built to churn by offering pilots and taster communities, most of which fail when the community is forced to scale to reach enterprise level. We go from a few classrooms to a few schools to a policy as enforcement. The churn point.

Sink is all about why people engage. Why people sink time and intellectual investment into learning or playing online. It is why people want to use a virtual world – or why they want to learn from YouTube. Drift is why they stop using it, or stop being interested. Community is the hook that pulls people into Educational Technology and what keeps them there. Immersion is what teachers and leaders need to be concerned with. It is rare for a politician to talk about immersing teachers in a culture of … as they have no real access to communities that do – they are not buraucrats.

The strategy of adding more hardware, more tools, more resources, more policy does not promote community of immersion. It promotes churn (I tried, and didn’t like), sink (I wanted to do it, but it was blocked) and drift (I have been using some technology, but that now I’m told its old hat).  I think that when you get beyond around 250 members of a community – you will see sub-groups forming with their own sub interests – leading and coordinating those is a whole new level. In EdTech communities; the laws of churn, sink and drift determine everything.

This is why we see teachers churning out the classrooms, sinking thousands of hours into online communities nand drifing away from the ideology and philosphies that were installed in them as pre-teachers. We love our small communities – as we reach that level of participation and action quicky (classrooms, small groups etc) and use the big communities (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs) to locate them.

These communities operate at an almost intutitive level, they defend, promote, create and help constantly, the best ones do it for free and never attempt to rule the members but enable them. Second Classroom reached 250 members this week. A virtual community that now has to level up if it is going to become a big strong one.

There is much written about communities, especially around students. Seth Godin uses the ‘tribe’ metaphor and says ‘we need you to lead us‘. I wonder if leadership plays out differently where leader is to a greater or lesser degree, a designer or the game maker, not your hierarchical superior.  If we are seeking Godin’s view of leadership, is education trying to turn gas into a solid.

There are some tenants needed for effective community. MMOs, Virtual Worlds and Open Source more often demonstrate understanding that to work members/players must have a shared pool of knowledge. They must follow and abide by common practices. They must have a history (either self-evolved, or presented though a back-story). Members must share a vision or mission goal for the whole communities future. Members must work together on projects so that the community to creates strong bonds between groups and individuals. They must also be able to negotiate outcomes.

A strong community is desirable over a collection of people using a portal, because members are less likely to want to break the bonds made between them. Portals have users, who have no bonds. To the portal makers, when the level of community-friendlyness extends to attempt to undermine the goal – it’s a warning sign, that there is trouble. Messenger or Twitter  in schools for example undermines a weak community – but strengthens a strong one.  See Shelly’s post about Latin Tests on Twitter and Laurel Papworth on banning social media in schools. Please don’t yell ‘duty of care’ … as clearly public education policy is medieval  in comparison to private and Catholic on this – BOTH have the same legal obligations.

There are levels in which a ‘community’ must pass in order to succeed. Leadership requires a specific design, revealed to members as they pass through these levels – but is always adaptive to it’s members needs. Leaders do get lucky from time to time – but also unlucky when things fall over or fail to work as planned. In a weak community, it shatters all momentum but in a strong one members will accept a bad day on the grid, lose a game or not get that code to run … a strong community rallies where as a weak one stumbles.

Strong community cannot be built though artificial means. Unless you have a leader you want to follow and who’s design you believe in – you don’t join. No one wants to join a crap community. Consider how easily many newcomers to technology give up (the reluctance problem) when leadership is less than compelling. We don’t believe, therefore look for the exit.

In Halo, we get killed, in Second Life, we all get logged out and in Open Source, things crash – but we try again, we learn from it, and make it better next time.

These levels probably have shades of gray, but I see them like this – and I’m sure you can swap out the examples).

1. community of communication (twitter, messenger, facebook, myspace, bebo, workmail)
   
2. community of interest (nings, wikis, games, forums, second life)
   
3. community of practice (collabatoriums – sourceforge, indie games)
   
4. community of commitment (advocacy, guilds, networks)
   

Any group which gets to the last level here is a force to be reckoned with. There is an almost spiritual bond between it’s members – who both advocate, maintain and defend it. The Church is a great example. They have the community thing down to a fine art, but the Minister for Edumaction – I don’t think so. So we are left with using policy to force group creation. Policy is supposed to protect the organisation and members but does not create community. When members cannot succeed or operate without being in the group, they never become a strong community as the policy is the bubble that defines the operational limits, regardless of the groups increasing abilities and interests.

We can’t replicate what we see happening in conference lounges between networked friends or in Warcraft inside systems defined by policies designed to prevent it. Open Source for example didn’t start with a policy but and idea and people who rallied around it to form community. We can’t realistically expect a ‘revolution’ because Rudd wrote a policy. We can expect compliance and performance pressures.

A great community is one which is communicating and working intuitively on their need to strengthen and defend members and values, as well as achieve operational and strategic goals. There are thousands of these online today. People who are  not just saying they believe – but truly believing. From Car Audio to Steam Punk Photography, there’s a community for everyone and an opportunity for everyone to make a new one. It stands to reason that there is increasing opportunity to learn in places that didn’t exist a decade ago.

Seth Godin calls these people ‘true fans’. How many of them are there in your work place? … or do you have people determined to prevent it – fearing some perceived loss? Culture, ideology, philosophy and many more behavioral intelligences play a much greater role in adoption that skills in how to use a computer. Participation in groups at the higher levels is entirely voluntary, so of course will join communities of their choosing, not their employers. We simply don’t hang out in the employers portals in the same way students won’t hang out in our creepy treehouse. Level 1 and 2 you can make me do, level 3 and 4 is up to me.

Communities, like game players, need to learn to level up. Players in MMOs or communities in Second Life such as Caledon operate at the higher levels. Members have the skills, bonds and committments to continually strengthen the group performance for as long as they choose to voluneer.  Leaders in these spaces are able to design for strong community from the outset. This is the missing ingredient in many districts, administrations and patriarchies – they don’t know how to do it. Its not in the MBA, wasn’t in the Masters and probably not the subject of their PhD. Anyone who is talking about building communities can’t be in it for the money, the power or the glory in my view. They are in it because they want to be, and that they want to participate in ways that the leaders have designed. Open Source is perhaps the best example of this leadership and community. Not using it in schools, locks students out of a culture that has tremendous value for them and society.

As if there was any doubt that information is increasingly heading into the Z dimension, Wikitree has gone open source – in response to a need to grow (pun) the solution. Wikitree is a 3D-Wiki plug-in on the virtual world platform, Second Life. Its a wiki, but creates the canopy of leaves represent the information, and versions of it.

Now imagine information is not in fact limited to letters, video, sound or images – but has three dimensions. Let me expand.

This is a Wikipedia page on a Spanish Galleon. I am sure with a little Google skill you can find a video or even a 3D render of one too. In wikitree, there would be a Spanish Galleon. You can rez it, move it, walk around it. With a little more imagination, the galleon is a fleet and the fleet becomes an Armada. Wikitree changes the dynamics of information because the things we want to describe and know about are multi-dimensional and spacial. But it’s not just a rezzer. You can vote, add, comment and do all the connected stuff that we love about wikis in the browser.

Look past the Second Life platform itself and picture this ability in high end game engines that already exist in MMOs and consoles. Imagine what happens when Porsche start releasing 3D information and you can take their prototypes around the track. Imagine when the school wiki – allows you to experience the syllabus in three dimensions.

Wikis are very powerful ways to create, share and store information – Wikitree is a further signal that what is currently in the browser will continue to be augmented by that pesky Z dimension. Perhaps most interesting to me is that it is considered architecture – not ‘media’.

WHAT is a good teaching strategy? It’s a plan for someone else’s learning. It encompasses the presentation of materials the teacher might make, the activities and exercises they designed for the students, providing access to resources and tools needed to develop a growing understanding of the subject – and assess it.

Laptops and computers are not a strategy and hardly a revolution without teachers, but the steps needed to succeed are hard to articulate. We now have a fleeting opportunity to reshape schooling with long overdue public funding, yet teachers still find ‘tabbed browsing’ a new concept. This is not funny, it’s scary. They can hum the tune, but not name the song. Even experienced, successful teachers that function well inside the cognitive apprentice classroom are web novices unable to develop any effective strategy, lock-stepped by intersecting perceptions of why they can’t or won’t do as the tide of change rises ever higher.

The strategy is relatively straight forward, but obviously requires access to a group of people who are experts in dealing with this issue. If we are to capitalise on school investment – there has to be someone to call, someone to help – when you need it. This is the role of leadership – to create a culture of participation.

This is the question to put to school leaders. “How are you demonstrating this strategy in your own work and provisioning it for your staff?.”

There are five steps that I believe must occur continuously.

1. Encounter the idea, concept, principle or skill
2. Get to know more about it
3. Try it out for yourself
4. Get feedback/evaluation
5. Reflect (I liked, I wondered, my next steps)

It is a cycle of transition that won’t be done simply though infrastructure – and it amazes me how easily we accept press releases from high office about size, numbers and dollars – at the absolute expense of effective professional development of teachers. No effective teaching strategy, no effective learning. This is achieved by working with people who can implement it – not just talk about it.