Sprout Labs Blog

What eLearning developers could learn from Independent Game Developers - Freeplay 2010

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:11:00 +1000

A couple of weekends ago, I was at Freeplay which is Australia's independent games festival. This blog post is not meant as a review or summary of Freeplay. It's an attempt to distil some ideas that might be useful in the area of eLearning from a dense and exciting weekend.

1) Make things that have meaning

This is where there is an interesting crossover between Serious Games and Independent Gaming. Serious Games are often talked about as games with meaning. One of the major themes that Freeplay explored is how being an Indie Game developer allows creators to make experiences that have meaning to them and their players.

Many Serious Games are commissioned by an organisation that wants to get a message out there or that wants a change to happen. Indie Games are the complete opposite. The content and the development process are all controlled by the makers.

Learning and development are interesting because they really should be passion-driven not profit-driven, but this commissioning process is often more profit-driven for the developers.

2) It's not all about profits

If we think the budgets for eLearning and Serious Games projects are small, think about doing this type of work with no budget at all. Indie Gaming is fuelled by passion. At Freeplay there was a mix of people interested in games as an art form and people interested in games for profit. One thing that was common across both groups was that they are investing large amounts of time and money into projects before they see any returns.

Maybe this is where eLearning is going wrong. eLearning can improve the productivity of businesses, by reducing cost and increasing skills and knowledge. But can it inspire people? Would a company that is owned by News Corp be in eLearning if the main motivation was making the world a better place?

3) What are the verbs for your course?

One of the sessions I really enjoyed was 101 Things I Learned in Game Design School, and a lot of the rest of this blog post comes from this session.

What are learners doing in a course? What is the verb of the course?

Are they reading, browsing, watching? Or are they building, discussing, planning, dreaming?!

I think this is a key to improving the learning experience. Many of our learning outcomes might have verbs. eLearning developers need to think more about the verbs during the actual courses and make sure they are more active than reading and watching.

4) Race to failure

The idea of early prototyping came up a couple of times, in different forms. Normally I use the line "Fail Fast", but I like the line "Race to Failure" and I might start using that instead. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because a number of our projects are at the prototyping stage, and bits are failing (sort of). We are getting some great feedback.

5) The first and last 10% of a project are linked

There were a couple of things in the "The First and Last 10%" session that I think are really important.

The mistakes that we make in the first 10% of a project when we are designing, planning, and prototyping are what holds up getting the last 10% of the project done.
If you working with a new bit of technology, then you haven't got the first 10% done until you have a working prototype. While the panel was talking about game technology, I think this works for many (perhaps all) other types of digital content development.

6) Play more games

If eLearning is ever going to go beyond screens of bullet points, more people who make, commission, and use eLearning products need to be exposed to different types of complex interactive experiences. Personally I think I need to play more games and think about how to educate my clients about what types of interactive experiences exist.

7) Think beyond screens

When we think about games, we often think about 3D worlds and people moving around shooting the enemy. But there are other types of games for other types of interactions. This includes new types of screens such as mobiles and new types of controllers such as touchscreens and the Wii. Many of these newer interface experiences can create direct personal connection. There are other games like Alternate Reality Games (ARG) that can sometimes be low tech, cheap, and highly engaging.

8) Unity Rocks

A lot of the focus of Freeplay 2010 was on creativity and not technology, but one of the sessions I really enjoyed was the introduction to Unity, by Ben Britten Smith. I've looked at Unity a couple of times and thought about it both for 3D games and for iPhone development. Ben gave a talk that was pitched at the perfect level for someone like me who knows how to code but doesn't know Unity. From the session I got the overview I needed. Unity has an elegance and, once you understand it, an interface that is really powerful.

For me Freeplay was a great weekend. I walked away with a lots of ideas and new information and I'll be back next year.

A couple of the things I've been thinking about recently

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:32:00 +1000

When I was planning Sprout Labs, the two technologies that I thought were going to be key to what I was planning were:

games
mobile technology

Games have become an important part of what I've been doing, but I also have had much to do with mobile technology. Currently, it's a bit hard to ignore the fact that smart phones have really come of age, and the iPad and tablet-style computers are changing the way we can access information.

The two key things I'm excited about are:

The tablets allow anyone to have easy access to electronic information. I've been working on a number of touch screen projects for easy access to standard operating procedures and other business information. These have been fixed touch screens, normally in workshops. I've got a prototype of one of these working on iPad. I think the iPad and multi-touch screens are really going to be key to making these projects really usable and useful.
Recently I asked myself the question, "What would a cutting edge factual/documentary project look like?" This led me to think about augmented reality technology, like the Layar, where, using a mobile phone with a camera and GPS, digital media can be laid over the view of a place. This offers many possibilities for Just in Time information and new forms of place-based story telling. I've started playing with this and expect to see a prototype soon.

Notes on X|Media|Labs Melbourne 2010

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:27:00 +1000

Six things we have learnt about developing branching interactions.

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +1000

This is the last in a series of posts that came from the talk I gave at the Serious Games BarCamp at AFTRS in Sydney.

The others in the series are:

Why Branching Games (This is a good starting point if you are not sure what a branching interaction is)
How we have been going about developing branching interactions for STE

This is really my first attempt to distil some of what I’ve learnt about branching games with STEM over the last year. It could also be applied to ARED decision trees and other decision tree development systems.

The images are links to the examples I talk about.

1) Reality is boring

I talked Janet Fearns from The Tasmania Skills Institute into doing a STEM interaction for the responsible service of alcohol course, because I thought it would make a great application of branching interactions. Walking into the planning workshop with Janet and a couple experienced teachers, I expected to be making an interaction about choosing whether or not to serve someone that might be drunk. Instead, the teachers made it clear “it’s not that simple”; it’s all about management of the relationship over the whole evening. We ended up planning a scenario where for the first three interactions it was just serving drinks and watching how much someone is consuming. The result was realistic but pretty boring.

What we found was the moment of conflict and critical decision making is most engaging. After the workshop we reworked the interaction to focus just on the critical decision point of whether or not to serve someone.

2) Simple media is often OK

I do a lot video work and Janet was keen with the responsible services of alcohol interaction to see it being done with video, so the learner could pick up nonverbal cues. In reality, shooting branching video and frame matching, while possible (and I did a lot of it during my Ph.D.) is hard. Also, the reality of bandwidth makes it hard to work with video reliably and without preloading. Video does give the rich sensory experience that we associate with games and digital medium, but simple images and text are easy to work with for most clients and keep the time, effort and costs down. In the case of the responsible service of alcohol project, we ended up just using a still image and text. Sound can have great emotional impact and there are bandwidth-friendly possibilities to be explored with sound.

3) Focus on where there is ambiguity between what a novice and expert might choose to do

I’ve found the greatest possibilities for rich interactions are found by focusing on the moments where an expert makes a different choice from what a novice would make. These are the moments and types of choices where the decision is not straightforward, and there might not be a right and wrong answer. A great example is at the start of the conversation about a marketing scheme in the electrical contracting course.

The expert’s responses would be “Tell me more about the ad”; the other responses are OK in some ways, but they are not the expert response. One of the great things we have been able to do with the scoring system in STEM is to provide each response a number of factors, which means that for some answers the learner gets a high score in some areas and a low score in others. With the marketing example, the “Tell me more about the ad” choice gets the highest overall score on all factors.

4) Make feedback part of the conversation not an added extra

With electrical contractor customers there is a simulation where in a conversation the learner has to make a choice that makes the clients happy at this stage but is technically wrong. The electrical distribution company hated the idea that the learner was able make a choice that was wrong. When they saw it their reaction was, “Oh, that has to change.” They didn’t like the idea a learner could make mistakes. They want a form of feedback, maybe a big red message saying this is wrong. STEM can do that, but in reality when we make those sorts of mistakes in conversation, a big red box doesn’t appear. A better way of doing this is like what happened in one of the LifeLine simulations where, when the learner repeatedly makes a bad choice, the client actually says, “I don’t think you are listening to me.”

5) Loop points are good

What do I mean by loop points? These are spots in the interaction where it could be good to return to, from where a series of themes can be explored and where the branches naturally fit together.

In the business compliance interaction for the electrical contractors course, a “To-Do” list was used a number of times for this. Sometimes in 3D games there might be a room with multiple doors that the player keeps coming back to.

Although working this way makes the interactions easier to author, it worries me that the “conversation never ends” and I’m not sure if the learners think it’s boring or find it confusing.

6) Situation it in details

With the business compliance interaction, it was situated in an office and the problems were described in text. This is a classic “decision tree” style of working. It allowed a lot to happen quickly, but it just doesn’t quite feel right.

My personal preference about what to consider.

Where is the experience happening and make the media reflect that.
What are the events that are going to happen in the space.

In many ways, what has been somewhat easy about many of the STEM interactions that I’ve done so far are that they are conversations. The locations are really simple and the events are really just the natural flow of a conversation.

For the business compliance interaction to work really well, the images need to be changing all the time, which would have meant a location-based shoot, props and actors, if it was being done photographically or maybe it all could have all been done as 3D renders.

In the near future I hope to put together a full guide and tutorial about how to develop a branching interaction. If you have been making these sorts of branching stories and decision trees, it would be great to hear what your tips are in the comments.

One of our touch screen projects running on ipad

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:11:00 +1000

Just had a bit of a play with an iPad and one of the touch screen projects we have been working on. Tablets have many great possibilities in training. I’ve been thinking about them as great devices for accessing and consuming information, and I really surprised how well the keyboard works.

These types of devices are going to be great for anywhere access to information and reference material and procedures, for a wide group of learners. They are simple to use - you really don’t need many IT skills to use them.

Now I need to buy an Android tablet, that is a third of the cost of an iPad and easier to develop secure applications for!!!

How we have been going about developing branching interactions for STEM

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 10:33:00 +1000

I’ve been holding back on developing an authoring tool for STEM, mainly because I want to develop more experience in planning, writing and developing these interactions.

The first couple I developed focus on using sticky notes on a whiteboard. This had some positives and negatives.

Positives	Negatives
The workshop sessions are a lot of fun	The results had to be written up afterwards.
You have a restricted amount of space. This means that you can’t explode into hundreds of branches.	The restricted space often meant that the interaction ended up being too simple.
There was a lot flexibility, e.g. to make a ‘looping branching’ it was just a matter of drawing a line.	The final whiteboard often ended up becoming a mess.

Using role-play

Lifeline Tasmania was interested in how STEM could be used for training and consulting. During a meeting with them I sat there and said “we need to map this all out” and their response was “no we can do with role-plays”. At this stage, I really wasn’t too sure about how this was going. I turned up with a video camera, because I was willing to give it a try. A lot of Lifeline’s training is done with role-playing.

The way we went about this was:

I explained to the participants the idea of the branching stories and how it was going to be used.
The client acted out his problem, and the telephone counselling used 1 of 4 different styles of responses. I videotaped this with the plan of just using the audio.
What was really amazing was that when it came to doing the other different styles of response the person that was role-playing the client developed a “structure” to the conversation, like making repeated statements. This made it achievable to weave the 4 different styles of responses together, into a structure where the learner could move between each of the styles of approaches.

With interactions around conversations, e.g. customer service and other people skills, I think role-playing is great, and it can be used as research tool and as a core part of the development. It may not be a process that can be used to develop every branching interaction.

The process we now use is

Explore some big picture questions
- Where is the experience going to happen?
- What are the critical decision points?
- What are the possible outcomes? It’s better to direct everyone down one
- path instead of having a single ‘right way’ and ‘wrong way’.

Depending on the content at this point, I’ve been able to develop the interactions from just that knowledge for the subject matter experts to check.

Fill in the details.
The details of the branches and choices are developed into a mind-mapping tool. I have been using Freemind. We colour-code the bits that are statements and the bits that are choices and draw lines or make notes where non-linear linkages are.

What has been great about this is that I’m now 100% sure that the authoring tool needs to work like common mind-mapping tools. I thought that this might be the case, but it’s good to be sure.

STEM - Why branching stories

Tue, 25 May 2010 10:05:00 +1000

Back when I started thinking about working with games and learning I got excited about the possibilities. I got an Individual Learnscope project to build the Blue Skies. This was a Flash-based game for people in the fields of design and craft to explore the link between markets and product development. This was always built for different applications and customisation. The idea with the engine is that a user would be able to research a problem and then explore how different solutions solved that specific problem. BUT when I attempted to explain how it worked to trainers and teachers, it just appeared to be too complex for them.

Back to the drawing board

It was back to drawing board to search for other solutions that could be easier for the majority of educators. You remember those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? They where one of the most popular children's books during the 80’s and 90’s with over 250 millions copies sold. These books must have gotten something right. One way to look at most stories and narratives in computers games is by branching stories.

With Serious Games there are a lot possibilities, but solutions such as 3D worlds are just beyond the budgets of what most of the clients I work with have. These clients are often just excited when there e-learning authoring software allows them to be able to make a quiz.

The solution I settled on was branching interactions that can be used for decision trees, branching stories or simple simulations.

I think about desktop-based interactive design as being a continuum from basic text and quizzes to immersive 3D worlds.

There is a lot that can't be done with these types of branching interactions but it is a start to going beyond pages of text and quizzes.

I’ve called the system STEM. It is Flash-based and runs on most desktop browsers and a lot of educational developers use Flash. It’s open source so everyone can use it and have control over it. At the moment changing a simple XML file does authoring. One day soon there will be an authoring system.

An example

A good example is from the Electrical Contractors project last year that Sprout Labs worked on. The focus of this course was about business skills for electrical contractors.

The original marketing pages for the course are shown below

This was reworked into the following activity where the learner is put into the role of being a business coach.

The reworking isn’t just about the technology. A major part of what was done was rethinking it as “an experience”. This meant switching resources from a being an information dump to coming up with problems that Electrical Contractors face on a daily basis and exploring those. These where practice activities before the learners moved on to developing their own business plans. These are the types of interactions that Cathy Moore talks about a great deal.

As Ralph (one of teachers and experts involved in the project) said, “Yes, the students could just read all that stuff but they wouldn’t get and be so engaged.”

What is really great is that I’m finding that educators have no problem understanding how to design and develop these interactions.

To download STEM see http://www.sproutlabs.com.au/stem/

Brain Science and Learning Design - notes on the TFLN session

Sun, 16 May 2010 17:09:00 +1000

Wow, for me the Brain Science and Learning Design session by Tasmania Flexible Learning Network (TFLN) was great.. It nice to spark idea’s for people, and this blog post is write up of what I talked about, with a few added bit and pieces and a summary of the discussion.

Why Brain Science?

One of my heroes is Kathy Serria, the founder of, and thinker behind, the Head First series of books. Back when she was writing the Create Passionate Users blog, I become interested in how her books were working, and why a simple textbook was so engaging as a learning experience. I love that my hero of learning design is actually a book designer and writer and not an e-learning developer. One of Kathy’s main interests is Brain Science.

When I started to look into the area of Brain Science, what I found is a more concrete understanding of how we learn than what a lot learning theories give us. In my consulting work it’s easier to say, “we need to be this way because that is the way the brain works”, than saying, “Constructivism learning theory says we need to offer experience-based learning.”

I’m not an expert in the area Brain Science but I find it’s a useful way to think about learning and learning design practice. One of the reasons I was interested in doing the session is that I saw it as a chance to explore and think about some of issues. The session had a lot of great ideas, and some of them may even be wrong! Hopefully, I’ve written them all up here.

Learning Design

Learning design is a process, it’s not a set of rules. What might work for one group of learners might not work in another context or with another group of learners. One of the worst examples I’ve seen of the use of learning design guidelines is in the Toolbox development process, where the quality assurance process basically says, “The course should focus on learner tasks” . In reality, what this often means is drag and drop style “busy” interactions that are a waste of time. Please don’t think of these ideas and thoughts as guidelines that should be ticked off. Please use them to help inform the design phase of the learning design process.

The sessions focus on four areas.

1) The brain is a map of connections

It’s almost bland to talk about the fact that the brain is series of connected neurons. Each thought we have is a chain of electrical pulses firing in brain. Leaning is literally the building of new connections. For learning to take place, the brain need spots to start building these connections from. It builds on what we already know. The best way to think about this is to consider the brain as a series of maps.

There are a couple of other things that are useful to know as well.

We try to hardwire these maps. This hardwiring is actually the forming of a new habits and behaviour.
Once a map is hardwired, it’s almost impossible to change that map. It’s easier to build a new map than change an existing map in our brain.
What I didn’t talk about during session was that building new maps take quite bit of energy.

The discussion

We then started to discuss and explore example

Ask learners what they already know at the start of a course.
This could be a forum post, that is, “What do you know about ...”
It could be task where learners do mind maps about what they know..
Give the learner an experience
Instead of the classic “Tell/show and then practise”, get the students to try and practise and experience first, and then to discuss and explore afterwards.
If it’s an experience that involves a risk, and just starting to practise and explore is impossible, some of the solutions could be:
- Tell a story about the experience.
- Give the learner a case study to work with. Making the case study come “alive” will engage the learner more. Some ways to make the case study more alive include interviews, video and other rich media.
- Use scenarios. This is partly related to the case study. I think what was meant by this in the session was more an interactive experience where the learner is given a problem and then can make a series of choices. Which is more like our branching interaction system STEM.
Then at the end, ask the learner to ‘map’ the experience. This is a classic reflection activity
Some of things we talked about included:
- Visualising the experience, by drawing diagrams.
  Telling a story about the experience; this could be a journal or a photo journal. These could be use technologies like blogs and Flickr.
- One nice example that I think came up at this stage, was the idea of giving everyone an image of river, and then people ‘telling the story of where they are on their journey down a river’. I quite liked this idea of combining a visual with a story. It’s maybe a bit too poetic for a lot training sessions. It’s an idea I’ve used in community arts projects in the past.
- I’m going add a few other things here that could work face to face or online:
  - Preparing a report that talks about what happened and what they learnt.
  - Giving a presentation about the experience.
  - If it’s step by step content, getting the student to develop a Standard Operation Procedure.

What is interesting about all these idea’s is most of them are not content heavy. They don’t involved developing complex media, and we didn’t talk about quizes or drag and drop interactions.

2) Everyone’s maps are different.

In our brains, these maps are organised differently for everyone. During the session, I talked about how, during a face to face session, a student might not ‘get something’ and then another student might explain it in a different way. The teacher’s map wasn’t anything like the student’s, and the other student’s map was useful for that student.

I talked about how hard this is to do online. Someone pointed out that it’s not really that hard in an online course that has a strong facilitation model and that uses technologies like discussions and other social media.

In the Head First books, they do this by presenting the same information in multiple ways, often in multiple contexts. This means a concept might be woven into a diagram and also used in a story. When you are reading the books, this can be really useful if you having trouble with a concept, at other times it can drive you crazy.

The discussion

An nice example that came up during the discussion was using a document viewer during video conferences.
One of the important points from the discussion was that using multiple media can be overdone. It’s always best to choose the right media for the content and context.

3) What we call thinking is activity in activity in the prefrontal cortex.

This part of the session was inspired by the first part of David Rock’s new book “Your Brain At Work”, which focuses on the limitations and strengths of the prefrontal cortex. He uses a great metaphor of it being like a stage, where actors come and go. I personally understand this type of brain activity as the ‘voice in the head’ .

The important points for learning design are:

The stage is quite small, and actors (thoughts) can come and go quite quickly if we are not careful.
While this part of brain is responsible for decision-making, it doesn’t handle complexity well.

Research has repeatedly shown that we can only remember between four to seven things at one time. The way I’ve working with this is by trying to cut down the number of sections in a course and reducing the options learners have at each stage.
Philip E. Rose, in his research, found that expert chess players remember moves and chunk information together, and it’s been found by chunking and grouping information together in a visual way can allow us to deal with more complexity.

The discussion

Breaking experiences and information down into discrete parts aids learning.
Putting related information together and grouping the information to what we already know assists learning.

4) The default state for our brain is the “Narrative Circuit”

Norman Farbin, while research mindfullness and mediation, divided our brain activity into two types. One is the “experience circuit”. This is the moment when the chatter in our heads has become quiet, and our focus is on our direct, sensory experience. Most of the time, our minds are actually in a default state, where they are chattering - Farbin called this the “narrative circuit”. When we are involved in narrative thinking, the pre-frontal part of the brain is being used and the hippocampus The hippocampus is where we store memories.

During the day, as we have new experiences and new thoughts, how does the brain decide what to store? It stores what is emotionally important.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were hunters and gatherers and lived in caves. Our brains are really still wired for that life. For the moment, imagine one day you go out of the cave and head towards the sun. After a while you come across a lion pack that you have never seen before. Your heart starts beating, and you know this is a life or death moment. Luckily for you, the lions don’t see you. You will remember where those lions are because it’s important to you. When you get back the cave, you tell the story of how you found the new lion pack. Because it’s important for everyone in tribe, they will also remember your story.

The key ideas to this are:

We remember what is important to us and what has an emotional impact.
Your memories are stored as stories.

Some of the approaches to the ideas we talked about:

Start a course with a story that grabs the attention of the learners. Things like % of people that get things wrong, what are the nightmare that can go wrong if you get this wrong.
Make sure the stories have an emotional impact.
Get the learners to develop their own stories and story maps.
What is interesting is these ideas start to loop back to many of the ideas in the first part of the discussion.

What we talked about in the session, and in this blog post, are just four things from Brain Science that help can inform learning and instructional design. There’s a lot more we can learn from Brain Science, and I hope to think and write about more in this bog in the future.

Some useful links

Sydney Serious Games Barcamp @ AFTRS 7th/May/2010 - Notes, observations and thoughts

Mon, 10 May 2010 18:00:00 +1000

Event reports and write-ups are always a bit odd. They are only one person’s viewpoint and filter, and only a selection of the sessions that took place. In these notes, if I’ve missed really exciting stuff - sorry.

This BarCamp was my first; maybe it was a bit of risk to sponsor the food when I wasn’t 100% sure what was happening. But I had feeling it was the right thing to do. In actual fact, the event reminded me in many ways of the Polar/Solar new media arts events I was part of back in the 90’s. This is what I hoping for, it’s part of the reason why I was excited about the event. There was a good feel to the day. I personally really loved how in the it was more a ‘have you thought about …’ style. I personally got a lot from this. If I was doing a session again, I think I’d organise it more as a discussion. This time around, my session was a lot about ordering and bringing together some thoughts and experiences.

One of the surprising things about the day for me, was how many people where interested in non-digital games - things like training games, learning games and role-plays. There was a real diversity to the day and the presentations. It did feel to me like a lot of the presenters and the audience were learning focused. Other recent Serious Games events, like the Serious Games and Documentary LAMP event at AFTRS last year, were constructed to bring a new narrative to the games at a time when there was funding from the ABC aimed at doing just that. The LAMP days were constructed as a learning experience for the audience. A Barcamp is not a constructed, curated event. Maybe, at the moment, the learning area is in more of need of ‘Gaming’ than the game area is in need of becoming ‘Serious’.

Often at conferences you have people talking about their visionary idea’s. Instead, we had a lot case studies and solid examples. People doing things, not people dreaming about what can be done. On another weekend, I’m sure other people would have been there and the focus could have been quite different.

Notes and observations on some of the sessions

The visionary session I loved was Rohan Story’s self-powered game. The game is played by getting on a bike and pedalling. The speed of the pedalling and the direction of your steering controls a virtual bike moving around the screen. The people that tried it out were really excited by it.

What I took way from the session:

Adding something like a game to an activity like exercise can make it more engaging.
Rohan’s technology was really simple. Often simulations that combine physical things like train controls and graphics are extremely expensive. Rohan reminded me that they needn’t be expensive.

Selena Griffith, from the College of Fine Arts (COFA), talked about how she is working with students to create awareness of the ‘wicked problem’ of design and sustainability. Selena’s work is a great example of ‘gaming up’, a face to face course. Wicked problems are problems where the solution isn’t known when the question is asked, and there is often not a single, right answer. They are problems where there is no current model, and if something can't be modelled, it can't readily be turned into a digital media experience. If you were to add technology to what Selena was doing, then I think online role play in virtual worlds could be a solution. But is that is what is really needed? Most of the examples during the day that were non-digital were dealing with problems that couldn’t easily be ‘modelled’.

Bronwyn Stuckey talked about Quest Atlantis. This is a virtual world learning environment for 9 to 12 year old students. One of the examples that Bronwyn used in the session was maths teaching. Maths teaching is often about practising theory and process, and not applying that learning to real problems. What happens in Quest Atlantis was that the students are asked to use maths skills to solve real problems in the virtual world. What I think is interesting about this is that the teacher could ask the students to apply the same maths thinking to real problems without a virtual world. But the virtual worlds have been a chance to rework and rethink teaching practice. This is the real promise of technology and learning - the chance to rethink learning design.

Elyssebeth Leigh’s session on ‘Understanding the Story Lines’ was a highlight of the day. One of the main things I took away were her words: ‘I realised as I was developing these games I was actually developing stories’, and her observation that most branching stories are a type of ‘Quest’. Through some recent readings, I’ve been trying to develop a richer understanding of the nature of story, and Elyssebeth’s thoughts, and Christopher Booker’s work that she talked about, has given me a some new threads to follow up.

People also seemed really excited about the Marigo Raftopoulos’ talk at the end of day, and the session on selling Serious Games to the corporate world. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to those sessions.

What next and the wrap up

The wrap up at the end of day was a good thing to do. One of the topics was ‘what next?’ and how to keep the networks and energy going. Eyssebeth Leigh talked about the Simulation Industry Association of Australia’s (SIAA) interest in forming special interest groups, and the possibility of forming a Serious Games Special Interest Group. I’ve also talked to a handful of people about the idea of a Serious Game Association. The seed for the idea was actually planted by Jeevan Josh from Knowledge Working, and I’ve really just been exploring it. The conclusion that I came to was that there wasn’t so much a need for a new association as a special interest group. This reflects the position of Serious Games as hybrid of disciplines (I have a feeling that over time the term Serious Games will actually stop being used). A special interest group of SIAA is the perfect solution to the need to bring people together.

The other idea that was talked about was a ‘Games BarCamp’ that might get a more diverse group of people together. Another thought as I’m writing this is that it could be great to have an elearning or learning BarCamp Personally I think it’s good not to keep on repeating the same thing and to evolve.

I did shoot some video on the day and I will trying and edit some of that soon. All in all, it was great day, with interesting people and lots of fascinating sessions. Matt Moore did an amazing job of initiating and organising the event.

Presentation from the Sydney Serious Games BarCamp

Mon, 10 May 2010 10:04:00 +1000

Soon this presentation will be written up into a few blog posts.

Thoughts on Communication Arts Interactive Annual 16 Winners

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:40:00 +1100

Interactive Annual on Prezi

To visit the Annual Online go to http://www.commarts.com/interactive/cai10/

The future of this blog

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +1100

This Blog - practicing what I preach on Prezi

Idea’s for educational trials of the National Broadband Network (NBN)

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:50:00 +1100

This blog has been quiet recently, because we have been busy finishing off large projects. Hopefully over the next few months there will be at least one post a week

Most of this week has been spent putting together Expressions Of Interest’s for the Department of Education in Tasmania for what trails could explore that potential of the National Broadband Network (NBN) for education and learning.

I thought it might be interesting to share the idea’s. Most of the are a combination content and technology.

This is a long post ...

Using Interactive Video-based Games for Learning Classic English Texts

Jack is sitting in an English class. The lights are out, and the class is watching a movie.

Jack: “I hate watching these films. They are boring. I suppose it’s better than having to sit around and read the dumb book, though.”

Teachers use visual media such as video to add a visual layer to studying classic texts. The students’ experience with such media is essentially passive. Students such as Jack are disengaged with these styles of passive learning. Jack is not responding well to the process of reading, talking and writing. He needs a learning process that is more active.

Game-based learning is one of the ways to increase engagement for students such as Jack.

Chris Crawford, in his book The Art of Computer Games Design, suggests that games are “the most ancient and time-honoured vehicle for education. They are the original educational technology, the natural one.”

The most common form of narrative and story telling in games is the process of decision making. (For example, what happens if a player chooses to go through the door on the left?) Computer games are the contemporary Choose Your Own Adventure books, 250 million of these books where sold between 1979 and 1998.a popular children’s series during the 1980s and 1990s where the reader assumed the role of the protagonist and made choices that determined the main character's actions in response to each story’s plot and outcome.

During the last 18 months, Sprout Labs has been developing and working with Stem, a web-based open source game engine for developing branching interaction and stories (http://www.sproutlabs.com.au/stem).

Stem has been used in the context of:

Learning experiences for telephone counselling
Business training for electricians
Simulation in responsible serving of alcohol training

Our experience with the alcohol training simulation was pivotal in discovering a limitation of the technology over a broadband connection. We originally planned to create a video-based simulation of a conversation with a drunken patron in which the learner had to pick up on non-1verbal cues to decide how intoxicated someone is. Video is the perfect medium for this. As the project developed it became clear that working with video was just not possible with the current bandwidth available to most learners. The learning experience had to be reduced to text, which affected the richness of the learners experience.

The NBN will allow for these types of media media-rich learning experiences to enable students to reach their full potential.

With this trial we propose to test how using a branching game containing video transforms the teaching of a classic English text, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

Professor Pybus Cassandra from the University of Sydney and Adam Low from the UK-based documentary production company Lone Star Productions have recently completed A Regular Black: The Hidden Wuthering Heights. This inquisitive and unusual documentary is a radical new reading of Wuthering Heights that proposes that Heathcliff was a black slave.The trailer can be viewed at http://sheffielddocfest.joiningthedocs.tv/trailer-a-regular-black.php

We plan to rework the linear version of the documentary into an online, video-based branching story. Instead of passively watching video, our example student Jack will move around Yorkshire moors, trying to uncover the hidden background story behind Wuthering Heights. He will be choosing who to interview and what questions to ask, and he will be scored on his decision-making skills at the same time.

Jack’s experience of Wuthering Heights now becomes active.

Similar work is already being undertaken using different tools. One example is Journey to the End of Coal (http://doclab.voyageauboutducharbon.com/). For experiences such as this to be achievable with current bandwidth, the video is restricted to still images and audio, which is what we have doing with in our work for LifeLine. This solution loses a bit of emotional engagement and is not as immersive as it could be using video.

This trail of the NBN will engage the students in a media media-rich, active and immersive experience that has the opportunity to revolutionise the learning experience of a piece of classic English literature.

Combining virtual worlds with traditional learning management systems

Two of the major educational opportunities the NBN creates are:

Real-time communication and collaboration for students
The use of media-rich learning resources

This trial will explore the opportunities created by combining these possibilities. Learners will work with video-based and visually rich learning resources in a traditional learning management system, and then, based on their inquiries and reflections, they will move into a structured scenario in an immersive virtual world.

Technically the trial will use SLOODLE (http://www.sloodle.org/moodle/), a system that links Second Life (or Open Sim) with the Learning Management System Moodle.

What if, instead of talking about history, we could experience it?

What if, instead of looking at photos or drawings of historical sites, we could walk into and through them?

Stepping into History: Exploring the Past through Virtual Worlds.

The learning experience for this trial will be based on Tasmania's whaling history and will explore its interracial, multicultural nature.

Jorgen Jorgensen claimed to be the first to kill a whale in the River Derwent, in 1804. Jorgensen, an adventurer and once “King of Iceland,” wrote:

“I can boast of being the first to kill a whale in the Derwent. Had its brothers and sisters been warned by the violent death to which their near relative was thus subjected, I would have little hope of living in the grateful remembrance of future whalers; but the contrary is the case, for the destruction of one apparently attracted many hundred of others ... and the rising City of Hobart Town is yearly and rapidly become enriched on the oleaginous remains."

Whaling is the industry that defined colonial Tasmania; it’s also the industry that Tasmania attempts to forget.

The students will be immersed in a rich historical environment where they will be able to explore issues of identity, culture, social and race relations, and economics.

Stage 1: Media-rich learning experiences

UK-based Lone Productions, with Professor Cassandra Pybus, are currently filming “Moby-Dick in the Pacific: The Quest for Queequeg” in NSW and Tasmania. Following the success of the BBC Arena film "The Hunt for Moby-Dick," Philip Hoare, winner of the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. The Quest for Queequeg charts the exotic figure of Queequeg the harpooner, the first Pacific Islander featured in a literary work. The media from this production will be reused and integrated into a learning resource that allows students to research, inquire about and explore the stories of key people in the whaling community. In addition to the video, timelines and maps will offer visual methods of exploring these storie. Using broadband technologies will give students a seamless experience while they work with these highly interactive forms of media. The use of timelines and maps with historical stories builds on the work Sprouts Labs has completed on the Black Loyalist project during 2009 (http://www.blackloyalist.info).

Some profiles will be:

Whaling tycoon James Kelly is an important figure in Tasmania's development
William Lanne (also known as King Billy or William Laney), best known as the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian man, he was also a whale spotter

This learning resource will be hosted on the traditional learning management system Moodle.

Stage 2: Re-enactments in a virtual whaling station

After working in the resource the students will move on to re-enactment in a virtual whaling station based on the whaling station at Adventure Bay, which James Kelly owned. Extensive archaeological surveys of this station have been completed and the whaling station's details are known.

The scenario the students will be asked to re-enact is:

James Kelly's son has just drowned in a whaling accident. Kelly needs to find a new harpooner to keep his Adventure Bay whaling station operating. Whaling, however, is a not an attractive job because it's dangerous and gruesome work, so it's hard to find good people.

A student can choose to play the role of some key figures, including:

James Kelly
William Lanne
A Pacific Island character based on Queequeg
An escaped convict working at the whaling station
The captain of an American whaling ship

These re-enactments could be run at multiple sites. Before participating in the actual re-enactment, students will need to take part in online planning sessions in Second Life, giving them an opportunity to develop new collaborative skills.

Other approaches could be taken with the same content and scenario; e.g., the students could engage with avatars that are controlled by scripts.

The trial will deliver a new, innovative learning experience the meets the goals outlined in the Tasmanian Curriculum for Society and History's syllabus.

Using multi-user virtual worlds with the NBN
A virtual version of Sarah Island

This project will explore how to use multi-user virtual worlds to transform the way Tasmanian colonial history is taught in schools. Its aim will be to utilise use internationally record collections and award-winning research to further key goals outlined in the Tasmanian Curriculum for Society and History syllabus. In particular, it will provide opportunities for active engaged learning and provide a platform for critical inquiry, analysis, and reflective thinking. It will achieve this by immersing students in a rich historical environment where they will be able to explore issues of identity, culture and social relations, the operation of the law, and the way in which individuals interact with their environment.

Multi-user virtual worlds are one of the bandwidth bandwidth-intensive activities available on the Internet. Their large-scale usage by whole class groups of students at once is outside the bandwidth that most educational institutions currently have. It is one of the learning technologies that NBN will enable. As Clark Aldrich stated in Learning Online with Games, Simulations and Virtual Worlds:

The early evidence, both rigorous and anecdotal, seems to strongly suggest that highly interactive virtual learning is a permanent transformation of the educational landscape, coming out of its somewhat awkward adolescence of and entering maturity. This is due in part to the ability of interactive environments to produce better traditional academic results.

The promise of learning through this technology is that virtual worlds will deliver rich immersive learning experiences that provide a deep level of participation and emotional involvement within a defined context. Students can see, feel, explore, and gain knowledge and understanding of environments that are impossible to visit.

We are proposing to develop a multi-user virtual world that is a test case of how virtual worlds could be used when schools have access to high bandwidth connections. Instead of just proposing to “test ... virtual worlds technology in schools” what we are proposing is an integrated project that includes the technology, content, and implementation.

The trail is based on the book Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station by Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. This text is one of the most significant explorations of convict life in colonial Van Diemen’s Land and the only book-length academic study of the operation of an Australian penal station. For twelve long years between 1822 and 1834, Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbor was the most feared place in Australia. Clinging to the shores of the wild western coast of Tasmania and hemmed in on all sides by rugged uncharted wilderness, the environment itself formed the prison walls that confined the unfortunate convict reoffenders who were sent there. Based on detailed early nineteenth century accounts, Closing Hell's Gates reconstructs daily life in a penal station and in the process demonstrates that, even in a place designated as a site of ultimate punishment, it was possible for prisoners to shape the social and physical environment in which they were condemned to toil. While Closing Hell's Gates is an account that does not shy away from the misery of penal station life, it also seeks to explore and explain the rich diversity of the convict story. Many educational virtual environments are only recreations of places the the learner navigates. However, this project is focused on the people and their stories. The scenario will be based around James Thomas, a young groom transported to Macquarie Harbor for masterminding the robbery of the treasury in Hobart Town. This was a spectacular event that involved a great deal of planning. At Macquarie Harbor, James ended up working in the shipyard. He slipped to his death while running along a path behind the fence that protected the hospital from the worst of the wind (it was said that he was returning from a clandestine meeting, although it is not clear whom he had met). He was due to testify to an inquiry about black market trading in government leather. Remarkably, the painted Huon pine grave board erected by his fellow convicts to preserve his memory survives and is part of the collection of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery.

James’ story is a mystery that students will be encouraged to unravel. In the process they will have to engage with a number of questions that lie at the heart of any understanding of colonial society. These include: Who were the convicts? What was life like under sentence in colonial Van Diemen’s Land? What was the purpose of penal stations, and who was sent to labor in them?

While exploring these issues students will be introduced to a range of source materials. These could include:

Digital images of the convict records held by the Archives Office of Tasmania (recently inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register);
Nineteenth century and contemporary views, maps, and plans of Sarah Island (part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Site);
The trials of prisoners in the British Isles that resulted in sentences of transportation contained within the Old Bailey Online website;
The transcriptions of correspondence relating to Sarah Island available through the Parks and Wildlife website;
The population, punishment, description, and other databases relating to Sarah Island, assembled by Maxwell-Stewart, together with transcriptions of convict and other records;
The relational database of the Tasmanian colonial population, assembled by the Australian Research Council-funded team headed by Maxwell-Stewart, containing in excess of 900,000 records.

The availability of these materials presents exciting opportunities. It is now possible to link images of records to transcripts, to create navigational tools to guide students through related record collections, and to provide access to the results of research on those record collections that explore issues lying at the heart of the development of Tasmanian society.

Two different approaches could be taken for the scenario

Students would be given the task of unravelling the mystery of James Thomas’ death, by exploring the simulation of the island and by talking with avatars that are driven by both scripts.
Using a website and resources that go along with the project, students could research James Thomas and other aspects of the story of the penal station and colonial life generally, then actually build parts of the world and role-play and reenact the events.

This could make a significant multi-site trial. The final solution could be a combination of both approaches.

With both approaches, consideration needs to be given to the implementation and the skills of students and teachers. Sprout Labs would provide training and support to the teachers and students involved. What is exciting about this project is that it presents the opportunity to use existing resources to create a world-class educational tool that will enable Tasmanian school children to explore internationally recognized historical and cultural resources that will inform them about the development of their environment.

Smart Workshops

“Smart objects and devices connect objects in the physical world with one another and with relevant information. A host of underlying technologies support smart objects, but the key to their potential is not in the technology but in its ability to collect, store, and transmit data about themselves and the world around them. Smart objects and devices are increasingly common in the consumer world, but they are just beginning to enter the educational arena. Early applications focus on real-world data collection and linking multimedia information to everyday objects, but additional uses are emerging as the supporting technologies become smaller, cheaper, and easier to use.”

Horizon Report: 2009 Australia-New Zealand Edition

During 2009 Sprout Labs has been working with The Tasmania Skills Institute (TSI) to develop smart workshops in the Joinery and Furniture area to provide a new way of engaging with students who have traditionally struggled. This was under the 2009 Australian Flexible Learning Framework Innovations project.

When working in the workshop, students are able to access touch screens with video based Standard Operation Procedures (SOP-Builder) for some of the common pieces of fixed machinery.

The student feedback has been positive.

They are positive about being able to have control over when they access information. This means they are more comfortable when they forget what they need to do and have to review material.
These are students who don’t use computers everyday; the touch screen gives them an accessible interface which is easier to use.
Because the material is video based, the students have a detailed visual guide of how to work safely with the machinery. Learners who are attracted to these “hands-on” areas often struggle in a traditional school environment because they are visual learners. The visual touch based resources engage these students.

These are new types of visual job aids.

To achieve this project, a web application called SOP-Builder was developed. The application allows for collaborative sequencing and some collaborative development of the SOP’s in a shared online environment.

The system allows the SOP’s to be exported in different formats including:

As an HTML based version for using on the touch screen
As IMS Learning Objects so the learning assets can be used in a Learning Management System and can be shared.
A print version

One of the limiting factors with the system and workflow was the need to download the touch screen version, drive to the workshop and update the files.

Our vision of the Smart Workshops trials is to extend the project in the following ways:

Using the solution with students in 7-10 years 7-10.
Adding mobile media and using QR-codes with power tools and hand tools
Developing a workflow that allows teachers to choose which SOP’s they need in their workshop and having those SOP’s appear automatically on the correct touch screen.

1) Using the solution with students in years 7-10

The nature of work in the in trades like joinery is changing. To increase productivity, businesses are using computer controlled systems for fixed machinery (CNC) more often. This means that the learner needs a new combination of IT skills and trade skills. Learners need to able to work with technologies within the workshops. This project gives students the opportunity to do this.

The solution allows the students to have the same benefits that the TSI students have had:

Access to just-in-time, location-based learning support that they control.
Access to engaging visual learning experiences.

2) Adding mobile media and using QR codes with power tools and hand tools

Imagine for a moment Jim is working in a workshop.

Jim picks up the planer. It’s been a while since he has used the planer. So he grabs his mobile out of his pocket, he turns on his QR reader and points the camera at the bar code on the planer. The phone uses wi-fi to access video files on the touch screen in the corner of the workshop. A video made by one his teachers plays. It gives him details about how to work with the planer. This takes Jim about 3 minutes and he is now happy that he knows what he doing.

Instead of being the student’s phone the device could be a device such as an ipod touch which is supplied to students for use in the workspaces.

What is a QR code?

QR Codes store addresses and URLs and can appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with QR reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone's browser to launch and redirect the phone to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. QR Codes are a well developed technology that is common in countries such as Japan. The uptake of them in Australia has been slow because of the cost of mobile data. They are the solution that the Horizon Report explores extensively.

The other solutions would be RFID tags NOT to using RFID tags in a projects such as this are

QR Codes	RFID tags
Most phone and mobile devices have a camera.	Not many mobile devices have an RFID reader.
QR codes can be printed on any printer	RFID tag needs to be purchased
One QR code is linked to media or a URL once and then it can be reproduced easily.	Some of the common technology used in learning, such as the “RFID Learning Tables” require the programming of every tag, which is time consuming.
It's a mature technology	In the area of smart objects for learning itʼs an emerging technology. They are used in other areas extensively.

The suggestion of using QR Codes is based on the problems and failures we had in using an RFID based solution in the project during 2008. That project focused on students with low literary skills and learning disabilities developing skills in housekeeping for the hospitality industry.

Well feel that QR codes are the key technology to making smart objects a reality today.

3) Developing a workflow that allows teachers to choose which SOP’s they need in their workshop and then those automatically appear on their touch screen.

The media for these touch screens and mobile devices are bandwidth intensive. They make a good test case for the types of workflows and sharing that can occur with high bandwidth. The scenario would like to see is:

Adam knows there is new a SOP for the rip saw that one of the other schools have developed. SOP-Builder sent him an email message to say it had been uploaded. He logs in to the SOP-Builder system and the clicks a box saying that he would like that SOP in his workshop. He can preview what the touch screen is going to look like. SOP-Builder then sends the 2Gb of files for this SOP to the touch screen in Adam’s workshop. That package includes the high definition video files and the mobile media. Adam also prints out the QR code onto stickers and he puts one on the actual rip saw, so students can access the mobile version.

This system aids in the sharing of media-rich learning resources.

There also exist possibilities for engaging interfaces that use multi-touch technologies

Serious Games - xMedia Sydney 2009

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:36:00 +1000

"Want do you think the mixture of people here is?"

This was a question I heard a couple of times during the day, because I think that few people felt like they were with "their group." The audience wasn't the standard xMedia screen people. There were many people I had met recently at LearnX and at the AFTRS Serious Games and Documentaries day, and 1 Hobart face. During the day I met a number of people with a learning or e-learning background, and also a few people who work with interactive media. This meant that there were a wonderful mashing and mixing of people, and a crossover that the events seek to explore. I think this is the about third xMedia Keynote/Presentation day event that I've been to, and what I still experienced throughout the day was "it's about story" and "it's about moving away from telling." I think this might be because of the event's linkage to the Sydney Film Festival.

If you ask me, Serious Games has serious a problem.

During Morgan Jaffit's talk I really felt that "the area has a lot of potential" was one the key messages for the event. The energy and desire for games go beyond entertainment, which is what Jaffit and many others are trying to do with The Impossible Changing Brain Foundation and his move to becoming independent. That energy is part of the problem with the Serious Games; they're so BIG. Noah Faulastien talked about Ben Sawyer's Taxonomy of Serious Games, and it just seemed huge. Now I really see why there is such a strong debate about the name for the area! I actually think that within the next few years we going to have a range of names, and the area will spilt into small niches.

Although there is a lot of energy, there don't seem to be a lot of great, solid examples (maybe that comment is also because I've seen and played a lot of public examples); all of it feels a bit experimental.
The budget for a lot of these projects is small compared to AAA grade games, but the budget is big compared to e-learning budgets. The other thing is that a lot of these "Serious Games" are Flash games and a lot of the AAA grade commercial games are not Flash-based, but there is a growing market for casual games.

Highlights for me

For me it's an interesting time for this event because I have the technology for STEM working and now I'm spending more time than I did before thinking about design processes and how to help educators and teachers design games with STEM. I'm not going to post long summaries of the talk, but there are mindmaps/notes on flickr if you are really interested.

Ian Bogost presented an elegant model for thinking about designing games.

    ▪    MODEL
    ▪    ROLES
    ▪    WORLD
There is a model with rules, people take on roles that are defined by the rules in the model, and those rules and roles exist in the world.

The other talk that was a highlight was Les Sheldon's 10 Verbs. The first one was the most important for my staff, and Lee stressed the importance of writers. I often find myself writing text and dialogue, which doesn't come naturally to me, a visual thinker.

I had to leave early to catch a plane back to Hobart. One interesting comment that Brendan made at the start of the panel session was that he recently had had a conversation with someone from a Chinese university's game design program about how that person felt that new game engines are needed that do not focus on "shooting." I suppose that is what I'm trying to do with STEM by building a system based on making decisions

Where was the learning?

In one talk someone actually used the words "Learning Games," But I didn't hear a lot of talk about learning at the event. The assumption seemed to be that because the talk is not linear, it's active; so there must be learning. I don't even know if some of the social awareness games that Bogost talked about are really about learning; they are more about the awareness of issues and problems. Yes, an active experience is engaging; and a lot of evidence shows that games are learning experiences (this is why I'm excited about the area!). The reasons for this are that linkage promotes excellent games and learning is complex.

Experiencing something doesn't mean people change; how many people do you know who keep on making the same mistakes in life? Learning is more than just an active experience.

Maybe if some of the talks had been longer than they were, or the case studies had been more detailed than they were, we might have been able to get a clear sense of the learning.

It's been a journey since 2007 to "get our head around games."

My background is in digital media and interactional design, but game design is quite different in many ways and I feel that I have much to learn. I suppose that during the day I realized that many examples such as Durfar is Dying, the people, and ideas are now a part of my daily life. I've made some the same mistakes and failures that we heard about!

Suppose the day made me realize that I am farther along the path than I thought I was, that the whole field is young, and that we all still have a lot to learn.

Project Canary - Transforming safety training with serious games

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 08:58:00 +1000

Project Canary was one of the most exciting things that I saw at LearnX 09. I had the chance to do a short video interview (with shaky camera work) with Deanna Hutchison from the Mining Industry Skills Centre.

Deanna also talked at the conference and below is a bit of summary and some of my own thoughts about the project.

Project Canary is about transforming safety training in mining, through using leading edge 3D simulations. There is a real need for safer working practices in the Australian mining industry. Last year alone, there were 10 deaths in the industry. That is more than Australaia’s war casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. (http://www.awm.gov.au/research/infosheets/war_casualties.asp). Just for a moment, think about how much defense spends on learning and training.

Death by PowerPoint

What the mining industry is doing currently is death by PowerPoint. Deanna had one story of a mine induction where they have streamlined their induction process from 800 slides to 400 slides. The main type of testing was paper-based multiple choice questions.
What the industry is finding is that people may know what they should do, but they don't always do it. It is not embedded into their hearts and minds.

Their solution was to look at how 3D simulations could work for them.

Simulations are extensively used in defense, where the skills needed are often a combination of kinesthetic skills and thinking; where learning is a matter of developing almost an unconscious response to problems.

The first simulation that has been developed is based on a workshop cleanup. The learner wanders around the workshop looking for hazards. When they find something wrong they choose the hazard and then they choose how they going to deal with that hazard.

They might find a chemical spill. They then select that, and then they can choose to turn off the taps or put sponges over to soak up the chemical spill. They can put on their personal protective devices and have a look at the material data sheets.

There is no set order in which they do these things. They can move around the workshop freely. Very much like a workplace.

The learning model for working with the simulation is for it to be facilitated. The idea is that a facilitator or trainer would be sitting next to a learner watching them doing the simulation. As the trainer is watching the learner in the simulation, if the learner does something completely wrong, that's when the facilitator gives feedback to the learner on what they've done wrong.

The system actually doesn't have any feedback built into it. This is quite different from a lot of gamebased environments where you have got the feedback happening through your score.

I do wonder if not having feedback built in breaks the fidelity of it as a simulation. What it means is that a learner could mop up a chemical spill without any gloves on and there would be no consequences. Maybe the fidelity of the simulation is broken by not having some of that sort feedback built in. I think the feedback needs to be about the safety aspect and how people can be hurt if they make those mistakes. Maybe I’ve got this wrong.

Some of problems experienced in the project.

Technical Problems

The technical developers were used to working with really tight specifications often from the defense industries, where a customer would come to them and say, "We want a simulation to do A, B and C and C.2345 is going to work in such and such a way." The specifications were extremely detailed. The developers hadn't been through a complete design process like Project Canary before. Because this was a new project for the mining industry, they hadn't been through this before and they also didn't realize what type of specifications they needed to have.

There were also some interesting issues around using the VBS they are using. The engine was built for military use. At one stage you could actually eject from a forklift truck. The forklift truck had been modified from being a fighter plane and that behavior hadn’t been stopped. Another hassle was that to start with, every time someone stopped moving they went to draw a gun. In the long term that engine will allow them to be able to develop multi-user simulations. In the long term there are plans for simulations of full mine emergencies with multiple learners responding in real time to the emergency situation.

Cultural Change and Learning Design

The larger barrier is that the real aim is to transform learning experiences in the industry. They're having problems around the learning design because it’s a free form space with no built in structure to experience. It’s hard to build lesson plans for something which people might actually approach radically differently. My thought is that the solution is to apply an experience learning simulation based around Kolb theories.
The cultural problem is around allowing workers to learn by making mistakes and learn by experience.

As the project overcomes these barriers, the end result is learning faster and more effectively to become safer in the workplace. The project is a great example of simulations and experience based learning.

There is more information at http://www.projectcanary.com/

Websites addresses for Transforming E-Learning through Game talk at LearnX

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:55:00 +1100

Teaching with Games - http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/teaching-with-games/
Games for Learning Report - http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/handbooks/Handbook133
ABC Serious Game Initiative - http://www.abc.net.au/tv/seriousgames/
http://delicious.com/petterdr/seriousgames
Serious Games Summit http://www.gdconf.com/conference/sgs.html There is audio recording of the sessions.
Apply Serious Games & Virtual Worlds http://www.applyseriousgames.com/
Games for Health - http://www.gamesforhealth.org

Blogs

http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/ - Clark Aldrich's Style Guide for Serious Games and Simulations
http://blog.learnlets.com/ - The Quinnovation blog
The Serious Games Blog http://seriousgamesblog.blogspot.com/

Communities

http://seriousgames.ning.com/
Serious Games Mailing List - http://www.seriousgames.org/maillist.html

Tools

Blender - http://www.blender.org/
Flash Based RPG Game Engine - http://eduforge.org/projects/gameflashobjs/
Panda 3D - http://www.panda3d.org/
Code3D - http://www.code3d.com/
http://www.delta3d.org/
Unity3D - http://unity3d.com
Alice - http://www.alice.org/

Interesting Companies

Blue Skies

http://www.sproutlabs.com.au/blue-skies/

Stem

eLearning Review Processes and Quality Assurance

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:44:00 +1100

One of the stages of the eLearning development process that I seem to continue to in conflict with and confused by is the review and quality assurance stage. What I mean is the type of review process in which a group of learning experts reviews a learning experience during the development or at the end of the production process. The conflict and frustration have led to the thoughts and suggestions discussed below.

A review process is great if there is a set known standard and process.

For me, eLearning is all about innovation.

Most of what is currently standard is average, and it’s time for change. The area has much more potential than is being realized at the moment.

The danger in these review process is groupthink, and groupthink is the enemy of innovation. Standard groupthink responses are statements and thoughts such as the following:

“Oh, it looks different.”
“Oh, that is not the way we would have done it.”
“Oh, we know what works, and . . . new ideas are not going to work for technical reasons.”

Doesn’t academic research have a peer review process to make sure the quality of the research is good? Some of the features of peer review are the following:

It’s actually the “audience” doing the reviewing. Other academics from the community will be the ones reading the paper.
The review process is not being undertaken by generic “research experts.”
Peer review is actually about making sure that good research methodologies have been undertaken.
So often, I’ve heard that the best new thinking has had trouble at the review stage.

Now if I actually think about the types of quality assurance process used in eLearning they are not all peer review.

It’s not the actual audience; it’s often learning experts.
The outcomes, not the process, are being reviewed.

If you think you need a review or quality assurance process, here are some ideas about the way a review could be achieved in other ways.

I’m 100% sure teachers and developers would find services that focus on things such as proofreading, checking dates, and checking links valuable.
Instead of the feedback coming from reviews, focus on prototypes and start testing the learning experience with learners as soon as possible. This is what academic “peer review” is actually about—testing it with the audience.
Set up self-assessment checklists in which the developer measures the experience against the standards. If you feel like you need external input, then have an external person coach the developer through the self-assessment.

If for some reason you feel like you still need an external review process, here are some suggestions.

Don’t let a committee of people make the decisions. Have individuals review and provide feedback. Committees will just breed groupthink, and what will get through are the average decisions that everyone agrees on.
Review the thinking, not the outcomes. Have the reviewer focus on the process that has been undertaken. A good example of this is to look at the learner analyses and see if the learning activities match up with what is known about learners.
Make it a dialogue. Have the reviewer be a “critical friend”: questioning the decisions and thinking all through the project, instead of just handing over a report or checklist.

I suppose the key message is: If you have a review process, make sure it doesn’t allow “groupthink” to happen and that the process doesn’t get in the way of innovation. Trust people and help them to make the right decisions and let innovation happen.

Learning Activities for Visual Learners

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 09:43:00 +1100

Recently, I’ve see some learning designers who are 100% word people have trouble grasping what means to be a visual learner. Often when we think about visual learners, we think: “Oh, they will need pictures and diagrams.” This is a good start . . . if your learning design is an information dump. What about when it comes to assessment tasks or learning tasks? What sort of things could work for visual learners?

Well, think of “visual learners” as code for “we hate writing and reading.”

This is not much of a problem when your learners need to just follow processes. But when your learners need to analyze, reflect, compare, create, and generally thinking at a higher level, it’s a bit more difficult. It can be done. In situations like thinking at art school where visual literacy is high, it’s a given: most evidence is a visual portfolio. In that environment, the “outsiders” are the people who can articulate their thoughts well in words.

Here are some suggestions for learning activities for visual thinkers with links to useful books, tools, and websites at the end.

Photo Essays

Photo essays are simply sequences of photos. With photo essays, I don’t mean the combinations of images and voiceovers that have become known as “Photo Stories.” What I mean is just simple sequences of images. The camera phones in our pockets give us powerful storytelling tools. A great use of a photo essay could be to compare and contrast aspects of a workplace, or a visual diary.

Mindmaps

A mindmap is one of the “classics” of visual thinking. I’ve often assumed that most people have seen mindmaps and understand what they are. If you have never seen one, they start with a central word or images and then lines are drawn that branch out from the central word These lines then branch out into more and more detail. Most of the time when we are thinking about getting our learners to write they could be making a mindmap.

Flowcharts

Flowcharts are one of the underused types of diagrams in learning. I was even told by reviewers of learning recently that flowcharts were unsuitable for use in eLearning. Often flowcharts are used when processes or sequences of activities need to be explained. Flowcharts work really well when a learning needs to explain what is happening in the workplace or when decisions need to made. Developing a flowchart could be great when a learner then has to synthesize new knowledge and understanding.

Diagrams

Technically, mindmaps and flowcharts are types of diagrams, and the use of a diagram in learning is a huge area. Visual thinkers often just have trouble organizing thoughts into paragraphs and logic essays. This where diagrams can be useful, as a way to organize words. An example is when a comparison needs to be made: this could be just two boxes side by side with dot points in each box.

Now you might be thinking (or might be drawing by this stage) the following:

“Well, this all right for face-to-face learning where I could collect pieces of paper. Online images are hard. The online environment is about text and words, and our Learning Management System works only with text documents.”

There are a number of great free and online tools listed below that make producing these sorts of visuals achievable for everyone. What is more of a concern is the assumption that most Learning Management Systems work only with text documents. Most of the assignment tools in Learning Management Systems support the uploading of files; there is an assumption that these files have to be text documents. Actually, the files could just as easily be image files. Maybe the learner could even do the assignment on pencil and paper and take a photo with a phone and just send the assignment to you.

Here are links to useful resources.

A good book to read is The Back of the Nakin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
Freemind is a great piece with free software for mindmapping.
To learn more about mindmapping, Tony Buzan’s site is a good place to start .
Gliffy is an online diagramming system that is great for making flowcharts and diagrams.
ExploraTree is a series of online thinking tools . I’ll write more about this in future blog posts.

“We couldn’t find things” - Organizing learning experiences

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:37:00 +1100

I’ve recently been doing with a lot of interviews with project teams that developed eLearning solutions during 2008. One of the themes of the learner interviews was “we couldn’t find things.”

This has led me to think more about how learning resources are organized and their information design. At the core of any eLearning development project is the learning design, which is a complex mixture of disciplines; information design is one of those disciplines. One of the aspects shared between the two is the focus on sequencing and organizing. Information design for a simple website is about what information is put into each section of the site and the naming of those sections.

What I think is happening in the case of “we couldn’t find things” is that the learners are expecting the experience to be organized like a website and the teacher or learning designer has organized the information based on how it needs to be sequenced from a learning point of view.

A balance between these two needs can be formed. During one of the interviews, one of the students put his finger on it:

“They should have asked us.”

What I’m seeing at the moment in some of the eLearning projects is the learners are not being involved in the development process.

Here is a couple of ideas about how to involve students in the development process, beyond just testing the resource at the end.

Card sorting with your learners

In terms of organizing learning experiences and developing a balance between sequencing for learning and sequencing for navigation, one of the most powerful tools and activities is card sorting. With card sorting, all aspects such as activities, reading, and video are put on separate cards. These cards are then given to future learners, and then the learners are asked to sort and group the cards in a way they think makes sense. The users are then asked to talk about why this sorting makes sense to them. It can be done in a group as well.

Card sorting is cheap, simple, and fast and can be a fun activity.

Show your wireframes to the learners

Wireframes are used a lot in web design and application development. They are simple outlines of how screens and pages will be organized. Often, wireframes are just black-and-white boxes, with labels about what the future content will be. The storyboards are often written by learning and instructional designers, but these are more textual and word based than wireframes. Wireframes are the perfect stage to show a learning experience to learners because it gives them a sense of how it works, but it doesn’t take the same amount of time as a fully developed mockup.

There are many other ways for the learner to have input into eLearning resources development projects. These are just two ideas from user interface design. I would love to hear about other structured ways people engage learners in planning and developing resources.

Here are some links related to card sorting, wireframing, learning design, and information design that might be useful.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/card_sorting_a_definitive_guide - Card sorting: a definitive guide
http://www.gdoss.com/web_info/web-site-wireframe.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_design

eLearning Resources or eLearning Assets

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 10:34:00 +1100

As the year starts to wrap up, I’ve been reflecting on some of the projects I’ve been working on during 2008. One small project was prototyping a different way for doing resource development for a large centralize resource development project. These are resources that are designed to be used by teachers and trainer in different contexts. The project prides itself on the quality of its learning.

One of the frustrating things with the project was seeing how the “Learning Design” got in the way of reusability of the resources. One of the basic fundamentals of learning design is “focus on what the learner is doing,” not what is being communicated. At the same time, what the learners are doing needs to be relevant to the context in which they working or the context they will be working in the future.

At the same time, I’ve seen people in other projects spending huge amounts of time and money taking apart these resources and customizing them to a specific context.

This has led me to wonder what educators really need in terms of reusable eLearning: learning assets with great communication and information design. Then there might be suggestions about learning activities, but they are set up in a way that is really easy for the educator to customize or remove.

By learning assets, I mean things like

web pages of information
diagrams
animations
parts of instructional video

An example of this is a handwashing learning experience we recently built. The booklet has RFID tags embedded in it, and the learner swipes the pages’ trigger video on a laptop. At certain stages, the student has make choices about the video. It includes interviews with people employed in the tourism and hospitality industry about why handwashing is important and includes a video that shows the right way to use it. When it was first demonstrated to the client, the first comment was, “Do we only have this interactive format? Can we get the bits video and use them in other ways?” Because of the way we had set up the project and files, reusing the information-based bits was simple and only a 5-minute job.

Other ways to separate activities and assessments would be to make sure that things are always on separate pages or are in separate files, or you could code the xHTML make sure the div have names like activity.

I would love to hear what other people think about this relationship between learning assets and reusability and ideas about how the activities should related to the information.

Sprout Labs Blog

What eLearning developers could learn from Independent Game Developers - Freeplay 2010

1) Make things that have meaning

2) It's not all about profits

3) What are the verbs for your course?

4) Race to failure

5) The first and last 10% of a project are linked

6) Play more games

7) Think beyond screens

8) Unity Rocks

A couple of the things I've been thinking about recently

Notes on X|Media|Labs Melbourne 2010

Six things we have learnt about developing branching interactions.

1) Reality is boring

2) Simple media is often OK

3) Focus on where there is ambiguity between what a novice and expert might choose to do

4) Make feedback part of the conversation not an added extra

5) Loop points are good

6) Situation it in details

One of our touch screen projects running on ipad

How we have been going about developing branching interactions for STEM

Using role-play

The process we now use is

STEM - Why branching stories

Back to the drawing board

An example

Brain Science and Learning Design - notes on the TFLN session

Why Brain Science?

Learning Design

The sessions focus on four areas.

1) The brain is a map of connections

The discussion

2) Everyone’s maps are different.

The discussion

3) What we call thinking is activity in activity in the prefrontal cortex.

The discussion

4) The default state for our brain is the “Narrative Circuit”

Some of the approaches to the ideas we talked about:

Some useful links

Sydney Serious Games Barcamp @ AFTRS 7th/May/2010 - Notes, observations and thoughts

Notes and observations on some of the sessions

What next and the wrap up

Presentation from the Sydney Serious Games BarCamp

Thoughts on Communication Arts Interactive Annual 16 Winners

The future of this blog

Idea’s for educational trials of the National Broadband Network (NBN)

Using Interactive Video-based Games for Learning Classic English Texts

Combining virtual worlds with traditional learning management systems

Using multi-user virtual worlds with the NBN A virtual version of Sarah Island

Smart Workshops

Serious Games - xMedia Sydney 2009

"Want do you think the mixture of people here is?"

If you ask me, Serious Games has serious a problem.

Highlights for me

Where was the learning?

It's been a journey since 2007 to "get our head around games."

Project Canary - Transforming safety training with serious games

Death by PowerPoint

Their solution was to look at how 3D simulations could work for them.

Some of problems experienced in the project.

Technical Problems

Cultural Change and Learning Design

Websites addresses for Transforming E-Learning through Game talk at LearnX

Blogs

Communities

Tools

Interesting Companies

Blue Skies

Stem

eLearning Review Processes and Quality Assurance

Learning Activities for Visual Learners

Photo Essays

Mindmaps

Flowcharts

Diagrams

Here are links to useful resources.

“We couldn’t find things” - Organizing learning experiences

Card sorting with your learners

Show your wireframes to the learners

eLearning Resources or eLearning Assets

Using multi-user virtual worlds with the NBN
A virtual version of Sarah Island