Educational Gaming Questions
From Horizon Project
[edit] The 2007 Horizon Report: Toward a Research Agenda
The annual Horizon Report, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), highlights six technologies that the underlying research suggests will become very important to higher education over the next one to five years. A central focus of the discussion of each technology is its relevance for teaching, learning, and creative expression.
[edit] Enter Your Responses Here
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With the release of the fourth edition in this annual series, the NMC is undertaking for the first time a concerted, international effort to describe a research agenda based on the six practices and technologies featured in the 2007 edition of the Horizon Report. You are invited to participate in this process, contribute to the discussion, and help shape directions for future research in these topics across higher education.
This effort reflects and embodies the topic of new scholarship, featured in the 2007 Report and also the subject of a major NMC focus area initiative. The completed research agenda is designed to encourage a deeper level of understanding around each of the topics in the Report.
The results from this effort were published in October 2007 as the Horizon Project Call for Scholarship. Scroll down to see some of the ideas that were provided in support of the Horizon Research Agenda.
[edit] What are the missing pieces for Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming to be implemented in higher education?
- Compelling use cases (content of pedagogy); content exports and programmers necessary to creat and validate games.
- Cost is way too high; compete with expectations of students who are using current gaming environments; gaming needs to be linked to learning outcomes; technical-need standard language, developer environment; readily-available bandwidth.
- Standardized file format and development environment to facilitate module/resource sharing
- Too much to design on your own; multi-dimensional complexity (tech, narrative, learning), but that's what makes it interesting.
- Still missing the software applications to make this widespread. Will require infrastructure resources dedicated to the practice. Bandwidth will also need to be allocated.
- Easy authoring tools, network infrastructure, metrics for assessment
- It's not yet scalable. Takes too long to build, costs too much, not enough "experts" to build them, not enough guidelines for assessing educational learning need.
[edit] What kind of research would you like to see around this topic?
- How to reconceptualize "reality" validly into game contexts; how do you maintain ethical values (personal, social) in anti-ethical situations.
- Are there standards defined? Can we justify it in terms of outcomes? (Learning outcomes)
- What are the real kinds of learning that take place in a game environment (more than simulation)
- Is it effective (do we need to measure learning differently) and cost effective?
- Equitable network access will be necessary before this can be mainstream.
- What are the goals and objectives of MMOEGS? How does engagement relate to learning?
- Cultural aspects. How do we build games more cheaply to be more accessible?
[edit] What are the learning implications of Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming?
- Pedagogical vs. entertainment value; knowledge transfer to first life
- Does it work? Redefines the learning process. How to test knowledge?
- Education is intricately tied to media types. Books and video lead to one kind of teaching/learning, games will lead to others.
- How do we know it learning? If they learn experientially, can they articulate in text or verbally? Does everyone learn equally?
- Not all learners are digital natives. What about the adult learner?
- More peer-to-peer, more student directed, more project-based, less attention to individual performance.
- Immersive interactivities, definitely learner-centered, do experimentation and risk taking.
