Monday, 25 July 2016

A weeeee light at the end of a bloody long tunnel!

I actually read a whole journal article today.  This is a huge achievement as I tend to find academic readings incredibly tedious and they don’t hold my short attention span.  I think I enjoyed this because it was so relevant to me in my context, didn’t go overboard on the use of the thesaurus and got to the point quickly.  Having said that ... it was still long for me.

In particular I like the way it clearly showed the link between game activities and learning. Activities/learning is goal orientated, has a clear set of ‘win’ conditions (I like that phrase), and has obstacles to overcome to achieve success.  It sounds so easy and obvious.

It also had some criticism of gamification - good to read both sides.  It talks about those with high intrinsic motivation can be turned off by gamification.  Another is that a learner can get so caught up in getting “all the points” in a particular area, spending an excess time, at the detriment of doing other learning.  Also leaderboards can turn people off.  If someone had 50000 points and you had 100, would you feel motivated or defeated?

Wonderings ... I wonder about how rewards would work in the class; in games you need better and better rewards to keep motivated - how would this look in a class?  In a class of 50, how do you ensure that you are really getting everyone on board?

Glover, I. (2013). Play as you learn: gamification as a technique for motivating learners. Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telemcommunications, 1998–2008. Retrieved from http://shura.shu.ac.uk/7172/


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