Recommended James Gee’s book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy”
if you replace the term “video game” with “learning object,” teachers would be all over this
games develop problem solving skills

Christy is the government information librarian at the University of Waterloo

Took the Arts303 class: Gaming, Simulation, & Learning
– games – building the foundation
– scenarios: creating compelling content
– strategy: team, process, and community

sees narratives as the place where gaming comes in

used Bloom & Angelo
– Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
– Angelo’s Teacher’s Dozen

group looking at real “Canadian mysteries” as a video game – Redpath Mystery
used open source “Blender” software; took advantage of the community that had built up around the software

Rezlife in Second Life
housing & residence people for incoming students who hadn’t arrived yet

N.E.D. used VirtuaTools to teach students and graduates proper networking skills (“networking etiquette dummy”)
a choose-your-own-adventure type of game, so your choices affect whether or not you get the job

Christy worked with the Galapagos Sandbox
player can actually manipulate things like food, rain, etc. to view how that affects the evolution of birds
best part is that there are archives of all of the data that you can go back and review

Game-based Learning & Library Instruction
– is it effective? historically, no
– educational games vs commercial games
– evidenced-based librarianship (have to think of this as peripheral learning, not quiz the user on the answer we want them to know)
– experiment on staff!

have to be aware of different learning styles

purposefully left out the word “module” and called it a course and they learn lessons; within lessons, there are topics, and within topics there are tasks
topics:
– understanding government
– statistics & data
– legal resources
– best govinfo practices (references & local)

wanted to allow playing the game by teams and individually; the team idea worked well because the peer pressure made sure they played the game
interestingly, the people that are winning are the ones on teams
tried to add humor throughout to see if players actually read the text, including some Easter eggs that are useful at the end for bonus points
include a link to current standings

areas for improvement:
– learn from the video game; need instant feedback
– teach to the level of the learner

next steps:
– generally, the aim of an educational game is to provide students with challenges related to the main task…” (Kiili, 15)
– …where we fit in…where we CAN fit in; can’t force this on people – have to wait until they have a need

put out a call for others that want to work on gaming in instructional learning to collaborate and make it open source – contact Christy!

audience question: how did you get the statistics you use in the standings? (UCLA – has 29 CMSes!)
Christy: her co-op student tabulated results; game responses were emailed to someone who tracked them; approached the cms people first, but it’s for “strictly academic” learning right now

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