Back in March 2011, I gave an invited keynote at the JISC Scotland/Consolarium Game To Learn: Take 2 conference in Dundee, Scotland. The abstract read:

All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong.
—Weird Al

My mother told me cleaning toilets builds character if done repeatedly. The other night five friends spent more than three hours dying over and over again while playing World of Warcraft (WoW). She never said anything about dying. I found cleaning toilets only gets you clean toilets. Dying and playing, however, teaches you important things. Demons, dragons, dwarves, and possibly folklore, you could see, but learning, love, and leadership?

Sounds crazy, but it’s true: World of Warcraft has something to say about learning. Prepare yourself, because everything you thought you knew is wrong.

The talk went very well and the slides were available shortly after the talk via SlideShare, but I was somewhat remiss in preparing a version for my blogs. This version was originally posted on my WoW Learning Project site.

You have a choice of formats:

1. The original slides (slightly cleaned up) via SlideShare.
2. The original slides and notes (slightly cleaned up) via SlideShare.
3. A downloadable PDF version of this blog post (from copy at WoWLearning).
4. This blog post.

This post is a written version of the original talk with the more important slide graphics incorporated. It can therefore be read without the original slides. Enjoy! If you have any comments, feel free to leave them.

Introduction [Title Slide]

My name is Michelle A. Hoyle. I’ve been teaching in higher education since 1995 and I’ve been at the Open University since 2000, working in distance education.

A Story

Let me tell you a fairy tale. Once upon a time in a Brighton far, far away, there was a quirky blonde Canadian. She was probably not too dissimilar to you. She spent her days teaching undergraduates. She was a passionate believer in learning and in community. She also liked computer games, especially interactive text adventures from Infocom and their modern-day equivalents like Myst.

Every Christmas, she would spend two weeks in an intensive gaming fest with her partner. One year it was the real-time strategy game Age of Empires. Another year it was going literally to Hell together in Diablo. Dungeons and dragons weren’t really her style, but she did like the collaborative aspect and jumped at the chance another Christmas to try out the beta version of World of Warcraft, a new fantasy role playing game designed to be played online with large numbers of people. Two weeks turned into two months, which turned into 6 years. Her toilets may not have been cleaned as often, but she found love, leadership, and learning along the way. This is her story.

World of Warcraft: A Peek

Let’s do a little survey right here and now: How many of you know what WoW—World of Warcraft—is? How many of you have <gasp> played World of Warcraft?

Before we go any further, because so many people haven’t played World of Warcraft, you may be unfamiliar with what it looks like. Here is a short video created by a team of players as an entry in a World of Warcraft movie contest run by Alienware, a gaming laptop/hardware company. It’s one of my favourite player-made videos and it features many of the areas, creatures, races, and characters in the game.

Irdeen et al, 2010

Gaming: Preconceptions

We just saw demons, dragons, dwarves, and dungeons, all the classic elements of a fantasy world I allegedly disdained, thinking I had better things to spend my time on. You, like me, probably harbour some of the same beliefs about game players. In my mind then, I saw the average game player as a teenaged, pimply-faced guy, short on social skills and anything marketable, who hides out in a basement (or would if the UK had basements). He spends all his time glued to the front of his monitor, getting his video game “fix”. Hands up! How many people thought that? Don’t be shy to admit it. At one point you probably would have been right, but not anymore. These days, games are not just for guys and certainly not just for kids.

The preconception that the average gamer is male is probably still mostly correct, although it is being challenged. Nick Yee, of Stanford, did a large demographic study of massively multiplayer online role playing game players in 2005. Of the 1800 players he surveyed who played World of Warcraft, only 16% were women (Yee, 2005b). Contrast that with M2’s March 2009 estimate that 40% of the World of Warcraft players were female (Meloni, 2010). M2 Research also believes that male and female PC game players are almost equal. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) believes the division between PC gamers is currently 60/40 (Entertainment Software Association, 2010).

Preconceptions: Socially Isolating

Another common preconception is that games are socially isolating (Jenkins, 2004). After all, players are sitting mostly alone in their rooms. That is not the real story, though. As of October 2010, WoW had 12 million active players worldwide (Blizzard Entertainment, 2010). While there is much you can accomplish in this epic world on your own, the majority of rewards and advancement come with group play. The game was designed to promote collaboration and the formation of groups, both permanent and ad-hoc, and these facilities have only improved over time. Most of these players are probably not playing alone, at least not all the time. Nick Yee’s research (Yee, 2004; Yee, 2005a) shows that more than 75% of MMORPG players play with someone they know in real life on a regular basis.

Time Spent

Graph: US television watchers averaged 34 hours per week. British watchers averaged 28 hours. Contrast this with the average WoW player spending 23 hours per week. Sources: Nielsen Company, Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, and Brown & Hagel.

How much time are they spending? John Seely Brown and John Hagel in a 2009 Business Week article put the average time spent in World of Warcraft at 23 hours per week (Hagel and Brown, 2009). This matches up fairly closely to Nick Yee’s 2005 study average of 21 hours per week for MMORPG players (Yee, 2005c). People are often critical of the time they perceive game players spending in game. Is the time that unreasonable? The Nielsen Company says the average American spent almost 34 hours per week watching television during the 2008-2009 television season (The Nielsen Company, 2009). The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, the UK equivalent of the Nielsen Company, shows that the average Briton wiled away 28 hours a week watching television in 2010 (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, 2011). That’s more time than the average WoW gamer spends and game playing is an active, thinking process, not passive like television watching.

Preconceptions: Age

According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average game player is 34 years old and has been playing games for 12 years. Yee’s demographics showed that less than 20% of players were teenagers (Yee, 2008). This is corroborated by the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s 2008 study showing only 21% of surveyed teens were spending time in massively multiple online games, including WoW (Lenhart et al., 2008). The majority of WoW players are over 20 years old. Why is this important? This is the population we see in higher education, especially online higher education where I work.

Robert and Susan

Image: Biggs’s Robert and Susan higher education archetypes. Robert thinks, “If I just read the notes, I hope I’ll remember enough to pass the exam,” whereas Susan thinks, “This is really interesting. I wonder how applies to that article by Brown I read last term?”

UK higher education is in crisis and I do not mean financially. That is a topic for an entirely different talk. The crisis I am thinking of is around the nature and quantity of students we see in higher education. Robert, based on an archetype developed by John Biggs (Biggs and Tang, 2007), operates consistently at the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, and application. We want Susans, students capable of independent thought and the higher-level cognitive skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Universities used to be full of Susans. No matter how bad we were as teachers, the Susans would probably learn. The tables have turned. Government policies pushing more students into universities plus encouraging a culture of teaching to the test have resulted in universities having more Roberts than Susans. The Roberts are interested in the shortest path. We’re catering to this with our course designs and assessment policies.

Catering to Roberts

Jennifer Momsen et al. published a study in late 2010 examining the undergraduate biology courses offered by 50 different faculty across different American institutions over two years (Momsen et al., 2010). For each course, the researchers analyzed the syllabus goals and 9700-some exam/quiz questions, rating each according to Bloom’s Taxonomy. The results are frightening and not, I suspect, particular to biology alone. 93% of the test questions were at levels 1 and 2 on the taxonomy. The goals were somewhat loftier, with only 69% at those same two levels. This study tells us two things: one, there’s a disconnect between what our goals are and how we’re assessing and two we’re encouraging shallow learning. That’s why it’s no surprise that another study of 2300 students found that at least 45% of students were progressing through the first two years of American higher education without measurable gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills (Arum & Roksa 2011, cited in NPR Staff, 2011, includes book excerpt).

Figure: Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Kratwohl, 2002) contains 6 levels, with creating at the top and remembering at the bottom. 93% of questions and 69% of the objectives/goals in Momsen et al.’s (2010) study were below level 2 and therefore lower order thinking skills.

Our students are not that different from the WoW players, particularly in online higher education, which is where I work. How many of you believe your students are spending 23 hours a week on your course? How about across all their courses? I’m dubious too. Why is that? If they can spend 23 hours playing World of Warcraft or 28 hours watching television, why can’t they spend that kind of time on their studies? The answer’s simple: they don’t want to for the most part.

I am not saying that pedagogy and assessment aren’t an issue here. Good teaching, Biggs & Tang, say, is getting Roberts to use those higher level processes to achieve the intended outcomes in the same way that Susans do spontaneously (Biggs and Tang, 2007 p.11). We’re probably failing there too often. However, learning is a multi-person, collaborative and even social enterprise. We as educators have a part to play but the students do too. Their motivation and participation is a central piece of the puzzle.

Quest Anatomy 101

Through most of the game until you reach the top level, your primary activity will be questing. You can think of quests as being a combination of learning objectives plus the actual task to be done, so there is an obvious correlation between what you are asked to do, how you can do it, and how you can tell that you have successfully completed it. Here is a typical quest:

Quest: Taking Battle to the Enemy

“The coliseum is perched in the most dangerous part of the world. The territory we’ve taken from the Scourge has been paid for in blood and misery, yet the enemy continues to strike back with a seemingly limitless army. To make matters worse, this undead army is supported and assisted by mortal sympathizers, the Cult of the Damned.”

This is the reason and backstory behind what you’re going to be asked to do.The actual task is to “Go forth into Icecrown and slay any cultists you encounter.”

Ceilian Daybreak is located at the Argent Tournament Grounds. Because he is the person who is asking, he is also the person to whom we should return when we have satisfied the quest’s objectives of “kill[ing] 15 members of the Cult of the Damned”. We’re given the additional instruction that we “…may kill Cult of the Damned members in any part of Icecrown.” If we needed to return to someone else with proof of our success, that would also be listed. Finally, we’re told what we will be given upon successful completion. Here it’s money, a type of token, and our choice of increased reputation for one of the game factions (the Champion’s Writ) or some additional gold (Champion’s Purse). We would also receive experience points or their gold equivalent, although this isn’t specifically mentioned.

This is just one of 9600-some quests documented by WoWHead, an extensive community-driven WoW information database (WoWHead, 2011). Many quests are part of chains, where you’re led step by step through the lore or some activity in the world. Each one provides you with much the same information.

World of Workcraft

Not everything in WoW is fun. A lot of it is work: hard work, boring work. Repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again is called grinding. There are many kinds of grinds in WoW: equipment grinding, grinding for gold to buy resources, grinding for resources to make food, potions, or other special consumable items that boost your performance, grinding to obtain rare pets, or grinding to get various achievements. This is not fun! This is work! Welcome to World of Workcraft. Why do people do it and, more importantly, why do they voluntarily do it?

Jane McGonigal, in her recent book Reality is Broken, comments: “Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work. They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at previously unimaginable scales.” (McGonigal, 2011a) She’s talking about motivation, motivation that comes from inside. World of Warcraft is excellent at this, which is why its player base is so much larger and varied than any other online game in history. Bernard Suits defines playing a game as “…the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” (quoted in McGonigal, 2011b) How does WoW facilitate and encourage that?

Work Makes Us Happy

Hard work makes us happy. That’s what Jane McGonigal claims (McGonigal, 2011a, McGonigal, 2011d). She identifies six types of work (McGonigal, 2011b). They all have their purpose and they all affect how we feel about ourselves. Even some of the tasks I’ve described as grinding, which might be equivalent to busywork, are beneficial at times when we just need to disengage our mind. However, harder work, especially success at it, releases a cocktail of complex neurochemicals, chemicals that affect our brain’s arousal and reward systems.

“We only ever play [games] because we want to. Games don’t fuel our appetite for extrinsic reward… Instead, games enrich us with intrinsic rewards. They actively engage us in satisfying work that we have the chance to be successful at… And if we play…long enough, with a big enough network of players, we feel a part of something bigger than ourselves…”
- Jane McGonigal (2011c)

Doing satisfying work is an intrinsic reward. Being successful is an intrinsic reward. Social connections provide intrinsic rewards. Belonging to something, participating in something bigger than ourselves, and making a contribution helps satisfy our cravings for meaning, another intrinsic reward. McGonigal claims these four things appear commonly in the last decade’s positive psychology findings (McGonigal, 2011c). Doing hard things and succeeding at them makes us happy and makes us want to repeat the experience. Doesn’t doing hard things sound a lot like learning?

Fiero: Hakkar Dies

When I was growing up, my dad used to watch Wide World of Sports, a show that showcased athletic events from around the world. I never watched it, but I well remember hearing the introduction which had the following line:

“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition…”
Wikipedia, 2011

The thrill of victory. The agony of defeat. These are the phrases that stuck in my head and epitomize so much of game playing in World of Warcraft and of life. When people are challenged but don’t quite succeed, it’s actually extremely motivating. When you are learning an encounter with a boss, it is not unusual to get the boss’s health points down to 1% (or less!) and then wipe. 1%! If only someone had managed to get in one more shot or if only someone had managed not to die for just a bit longer. 1%! Argggh! You can almost feel the vibration of the collective groan that goes up from the players. That’s the agony of defeat. You can feel that success is close. It’s achievable.

On the flip side, we have victory. Victory is sweet. Do you remember the last time you succeeded at something and felt a rush of pride and joy? I first encountered the Italian term fiero in Nicola Lazzaro’s 2004 white paper Why We Play Games (Lazzaro, 2004). In it, she describes fiero as “Personal triumph over adversity. The ultimate game emotion. Overcoming difficult obstacles players raise their arms over their heads. They do not need to experience anger prior to success, but it does require effort.” —that’s the thrill of victory.

One of my favourite moments in World of Warcraft is the killing of Hakkar. Our 20-person group had been trying to complete Hakkar’s dungeon for the better part of a year. Hakkar was the last boss and you had to kill all the other bosses first. This was hard because it all had to be done within a week period because dungeons reset weekly. We didn’t make it to Hakkar every week. The few times we did, we wiped over and over and over again. When we finally succeeded, the players were yelling. They were exultant. I was exultant. It was fiero. Even remembering it now, 4 years later, brings back that feeling. That feeling is addictive. We want to feel that. We have a choice: persist or die! It’s a choice we’re voluntarily making.

Lessons To Learn

John Seely Brown and John Hagel outlined 8 lessons in 2009 that businesses could learn from World of Warcraft to foster creativity and promote innovation (Hagel and Brown, 2009). I believe these same lessons could be applied to the design of education:

1. Reduce barriers to entry and to advance in initial stages.
2. Provide rich performance metrics.
3. Keep raising the bar.
4. Remember to account for and use intrinsic motivations.
5. Provide opportunities to develop shared knowledge not easily shared but don’t forget broader knowledge exchange.
6. Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging goals.
7. Encourage frequent performance feedback.
8. Create an environment that rewards new dispositions.

Some of these we have already looked at, like accounting for and using intrinsic motivations. We also saw how teams, large and small, fixed and ad-hoc, can self-organize around challenging goals. Guilds and fixed teams provide opportunities to share knowledge, both tacit and factual. The others likely require some discussion. For the first, it is easy to start in the game. You begin at level 1 but you’re guided through a series of ever more difficult quests—the bar is constantly rising. Levelling up is quick and easy in the initial stages. This is what reducing barriers to entry means. People do not need to invest much to get started. It’s low-risk and high reward, which helps get people interested and keeps them interested.

New Dispositions

The last “lesson” is to create an environment that rewards new dispositions. In an earlier article John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas describe the “gamer disposition”, characteristics Brown thought World of Warcraft encouraged. These included being bottom-line oriented, thriving on change, understanding the power of diversity, believing learning is fun, and “marinating on the ‘edge’” (Brown and Thomas, 2008). This last one means that gamers, even when they know of a working solution, will often try out other strategies, looking for a better solution. They are not afraid to experiment or to try something completely outrageous. Aren’t these characteristics we would like our students to exhibit?

Failure Is Good

I’d like to add an additional “lesson”: Failure is desirable, provided the consequences are manageable. Gamers are not afraid to fail, repeatedly. In games, failure is what leads to innovation and learning. It also leads eventually to success and fiero. We are often afraid to let people fail. It lowers retention rates, which lowers our funding, but it also leads to grade inflation and degradation of our degrees. It’s a slippery slope and we may be denying students the opportunity to feel real satisfaction.

Figure: Failure leads to success, fiero, innovation, and learning; but only when consequences manageable.

The previous World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was widely regarded by hardcore gamers as being too easy. Blizzard, the developer, in an attempt to make it appealing and accessible to an even wider audience, dumbed down the encounters and made getting gear easy. Because you didn’t need to think, just mindlessly press your fire button (or whatever), the encounters weren’t challenging. Players were just out-gearing and overpowering the encounters. It wasn’t as much fun. Players felt cheated. It definitely was not very satisfying. Fiero was in thin supply.

Blizzard completely reversed that in the latest expansion, released last December. Problem solving and thinking are required. Brute force isn’t enough. It is harder, yes. Some people, used to an easy ride, had to adjust to a new world order and perhaps realize that they needed to earn access to groups going to harder encounters. That means working to get the appropriate gear, working to acquire the necessary supplemental resources, and working to learn how to play well. The people who are willing to fail repeatedly are the people who are able to learn, to innovate, and to improve.

Sample Teamwork: Learning in the World

I hope I’ve demonstrated that we can learn from the World of Warcraft, but what about learning in the world? What kind of learning and where? Let’s start by looking at a (badly edited!) video of a 10-person guild in a recent boss encounter involving two dragons. The complete encounter is almost 8 minutes. I’ve cut the video down to just under 3 minutes.

Screenshot: The Roses of Dawn (a guild) ten-person team battles Theralion, one of a dragon duo, on March 15, 2011 in the Bastion of Twilight.

<video: Bastion of Twilight: 2m 55s> [not available online]

There’s a lot going on here. There are two main encounters: one with one dragon on the ground and the other airborne and then the reverse. From my point of view as a healer, I don’t really care much which dragon is on the ground. I see the fight in three phases: the beginning where the dragon periodically casts an ability called “blackout” on a player, which looks to produce enough damage to take out three healthy players. To prevent the blackout player from being killed, 5 or 6 players will congregate nearby to help soak up the damage. In this case, misery shared is damage greatly reduced.

In the next phase, we’re all running away from the dragon and there are swirling circles on the floor. If you are in the circles and get hit with something from the sky, you get sent to a sort of “Twilight Zone”. The third phase has many nasty tricks. First, there’s another “blackout” like effect. That’s why you see the ranged players all stacked up together at a distance. While they’re standing together, the flying dragon periodically uses a breath weapon to make big, black holes in the ground. There’s also a magic spell cast on a ranged person which results in them damaging other players around them every time they cast. If that’s not enough, the flying dragon strafes the group with its hot pink breath too.

You can’t see it here, but if we fail to move out of pink bits or black bits, or don’t stack up enough on a blackout person, or any number of other things, we die. If one person dies, as did happen here late in the encounter, there is still a chance of success. In all of our previous efforts, we lost a number of people to the pink breath or black circles on the ground and the group wiped. Many times.

Basil Leads

You cannot hear our voice communications. Basil, our leader, is giving instructions as things happen, like “Middle’s safe” or “Nooo! The middle’s not safe!”, to tell people how to avoid the random direction of the pink breath weapon or maybe telling people to stack up and where. The healers are warning each other about things going wrong with the players’ health. There is a wealth of communication occurring to coordinate the complex dance required to be successful at this encounter.

When I asked Basil about raid leading and things he had learned, he told me he didn’t start off being a good leader. Practice certainly helped, but he has the ability to communicate and to learn.

Basil: Action Reseacher

When preparing for a new encounter, he starts by reading up on the various abilities of the bosses (if known), making a mental picture of what they are going to do or what it is going to look like, and then theorizing about what can be done to avoid the “bad stuff.” This model and theory is communicated to the group in a discussion before the encounter and then tried out several times, making small refinements or, sometimes, big refinements as he gains experience and members contribute ideas. It’s close to McNiff’s description of action research (McNiff, 2002).

Figure: McNiff’s (2002) six stages of action research: research, mental model, plan, try, review and revise, and repeat the first five as necessary. Basil, a night elf rogue pictured here, is engaging in this process.

Communities of Practice (1)

Teamwork and community have already been mentioned several times, with the game providing mechanisms for both ad-hoc groups and fixed groups of people in guilds. Guilds can be very large or very small. Ducheneaut et al. did some interesting research in 2006 where they enumerated guilds they saw on 5 different servers. Of the 3500-some guilds they had seen in July, just over 1900 were not seen in December, a 54% death rate (Ducheneaut et al., 2007). There are, of course, all kinds of caveats about their methodology, but the number is likely reasonably accurate and reflects my own experiences with watching guilds form and die over the years. While it sounds like these groups are fragile, they did also note that the longer a guild had been around, the more likely it was to stay around. Running a guild, as I know from personal experience, is not easy. It’s another place for people to learn the art of leadership and some people fail initially or several times.

Figure: Wenger’s (2008) key characteristics for a community of practice: joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and shared repertoire. Each of those is accomplished via various methods, like doing things together for mutual engagement, stories for a shared repertoire, and mutual accountability for joint enterprise.

Guilds, however, are essentially communities of practice, an idea formalized by the work of Jean Lavé & Etienne Wenger. Wenger defines a communities of practice as “…groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly…” (Wenger, 2006). Doesn’t that sound familiar to some of the behaviour we’ve seen exhibited? Guilds have a culture and whether that culture revolves around playing well, role-playing, or just casually having fun, the guild is a community who becomes more and more cohesive and better at what it does over time. Guilds tend to exhibit Wenger’s key characteristics of mutual engagement (which can include peripheral participation — the silent watcher who is always there, but doesn’t say anything), joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire.

Similar to WoW?

Figure: The Honourbound Alliance team structure in 2010. There were five guilds (top row) contributing members to 5 different, primarily cross-guild teams (bottom row). The exception is Dark Sins, which was made up only of Ye Olde Geezers members. Ye Olde Geezers contributed members to every one of the cross-guild teams, whereas other guilds typically only contributed to one or two teams.

The Honourbound Alliance (THB), pictured here, is an alliance of social guilds founded 5 years ago. Most of the guilds in it date back to the game’s release. The membership of these guilds and most guilds is self-selected. The guilds have an identity, shared experience, and shared knowledge. They last as long as members have an interest in maintaining the community and improving the shared practice. That is not too dissimilar to what happens at The Open University, an accredited distance education university in the UK. Students are given online tutor groups and often course-wide forums or course-wide social spaces. Both e-learning and bricks-and-mortar students form Facebook groups. Virtual and live study groups, meeting in coffee shops, in homes, on Twitter or Skype, are not uncommon. Membership in course and a study group is very similar to a guild: self-selected, with a particular purpose and identity, and a duration which is often, but not always, limited to the duration of the course; they can carry on afterwards. So again, WoW and higher education share some commonalities.

Similar to E-Learning?

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler in Minds on Fire relate the results of a study by Richard Light at Harvard that showed “…one of the strongest determinants of students’ success in higher education—more important than the details of their instructors’ teaching styles—was their ability to form or participate in small study groups.” (Brown and Adler, 2008) So pedagogy is important, but not as important as people learning to work together to share knowledge and practice. Study groups fit into lower right-hand quadrant, strongly in the realms of “non-formal” or “informal learning” in Marcia Conner’s learning space (Conner, 2009).

Credit: Figure by Marcia Conner, all rights reserved.
Figure: Conner (2009) mapped formal and informal learning onto a y-axis and intention and unexpected onto an x-axis to produce a two-dimensional graph. In the upper left quadrant (formal), classes and meetings. In the upper right quadrant (unexpected), social media and self study. Bottom left (intentional) includes reading and mentoring. The bottom right (informal) contains community and playing.

Learning/Improving Self

WoW is a problem-based learning environment with a continuous assessment process. You never have to take a “test” to prove you know something. The act of doing in the game is the test. We have also looked at how guilds are communities of practice for learning, culture, and game practice and how people are intrinsically motivated to engage in research, model building, and debate in order improve their performance or solve things in a different fashion. You might wonder if people go into World of Warcraft specifically to learn. My research looks at learning in World of Warcraft to see what kinds of practices we can adopt specifically in online higher education that will encourage community formation, motivation and persistence. Last year I did a small study where I invited players to write a short essay about why they play World of Warcraft. They were primed somewhat with an essay I had written about why I play (Hoyle, 2009), but they were not specifically asked to relate incidents of teaching or learning. I thought you might find it interesting to hear some of the things they said.

51 people started the survey and completed the first part about in-game demographics. Only 39 completed the whole survey, including the essay question. Most of the participants played on the European servers and most played on player versus the environment servers, rather than role-playing or player versus player servers. The following examples have been tagged as examples of learning while reading through the submitted essays. The spelling has been preserved and I have assigned a unique name to each different participant. The assigned names will be used in this and any other published materials relating to the study

“I enjoy playing as part of a roleplaying group most. The interactions in character, the humour, the banter are what makes me tick. That and being able to explore different sides of my personality.”
- Scandia

“I’ve been invited to join guilds but has so far declined – hoping to build my inworld skills first – and bring a friend along (one is currently ’training’, which is the real reason for the 2nd trial run). I particularly need to build skills in chatting in world and the friend is helping me along – as are the occassional people I encounter inworld.”
- Sulfurus

I have so far tagged 15 to 20 examples of learning that people found motivated them to play the game. I found it surprising people were playing in order to improve their social abilities or to learn more about themselves and other people.

Raiding & Learning

“It’s kinda the same thing with character progression, wanting to improve by reading about skill usage, by collecting new gear, trying out different specs/rotations, … Check how you do compared to others, analyse what you do differently & how you can improve.”
- Stannus

“I enjoy the sense of achievement of building up professions, building skills or completing quests. Learning how to play each class, and trying to work out what that character is and how they would react to different scenarios is what motivates me.”
- Scandia

Here we can see people model building and researching in the above examples, in order to learn to play better. This was not surprising to me.

Learning Languages

“I may add a minor point to the list of reasons why people play WoW: I wanted to train my english skills. As I’m not a native speaker (coming from Germany) the chat and the ventrilo communication help me to keep my english alive – I don’t have many other opportunities.”
- Beryl

“since i am a norwegian i also can practise some english, which is a good thing.”
- Potassio

“wow fore me is to chat and gaming with freinds and ofcourse inprove my english in both wright and reading.”
- Aluminio

The last several examples are very interesting as I wouldn’t have seen those if the majority of players had come from the North American game servers. Blizzard regionalizes the game. While Europe does have some dedicated single-language servers. the majority have players from all over Europe and Russia. The North American servers have players primarily from North America, Australia, and New Zealand. In North America, you’re far less likely to encounter players from other countries or players speaking other languages, whereas it’s fairly common on the European servers. It, therefore, for Europeans, makes a great place to go and practice many different languages, which is what we’re seeing reflected here.

Study: Tags Used

I fed Wordle a delimited list of tags allocated so far in the study along with the frequency with which the tag was used. Wordle attempts to aesthetically arrange and represent the tags by frequency usage. The larger the word in the diagram, the more often it was used.

You can see some interesting things appearing. “Guild life”, “team work”, and “assisting others” feature quite prominently. People are greatly invested in their social groups and into contributing to those groups and the wider culture. “Judging self”, where people analyze their own capabilities and performance, is also a recurring theme. “Impact on reality” is where people have said something about the game affecting their life, either positively or negatively. I’m currently trying to do a more sophisticated analysis that correlates things specifically identifiable as motivation or persistence with those tags, to get a feeling of which are things only mentioned in passing versus being a key component to the question of motivation and persistence. There’s much left to explore.

Recommended Reading

If you’d like to learn more about how games foster literacy and learning and how they can make a different, I recommend the following two books: James Paul Gee’s “What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” and Jane McGonigal’s just released “Reality Is Broken”.

Thanks

Image: Group shot of my guild at a guild birthday party. Thanks to The One (my guild) and The Honourbound Alliance on EU-Thunderhorn. Thanks also to @lizit and @misetak on Plurk, Drs. Good, Whitby, and McCallister and the HCT group at the University of Sussex; and Basil for everything.

In going from the real me to the virtual me in World of Warcraft, I have learned so much about myself, learning, communities, and motivation. I have learned to embrace failure, because, really, the choice is simple: persist or die.

More Information

The slides will be posted on SlideShare. There is more information about my research on the WoW Learning Project website at http://wowlearning.org/. Contact me at Sussex: eingang AT sussexDOTacDOTuk. Or follow me on Twitter, where I’m @Eingang.

Thank you.

Disclaimer: No toilets were cleaned in the making of this presentation.

References

Biggs, J. & Tang, C. (2007) ‘Chapter 1: The Changing Scene in University Teaching’, in Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd edition. Maidenhead, United Kingdom:Open University Press. pp. 1-14.

Blizzard Entertainment, I. (2010) World of Warcraft(®) Subscriber Base Reaches 12 Million Worldwide, [online]. Available from: http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.html?101007 (Accessed March 14, 2011).

Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board. (2011) Monthly Total Viewing Summary, [online] Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board. Available from: http://www.barb.co.uk/report/monthlyViewing (Accessed March 12, 2011).a

Brown, J.S. & Thomas, D. (2008) ‘The Gamer Disposition’, Harvard Business Review, blog entry posted February 14, 2008. Available from http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2008/02/the_gamer_disposition.html (Accessed March 16, 2011).

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008) ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0’ EDUCAUSE Review, 43 (1), [Online] Available from:http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 (Accessed August 22, 2008).

Churches, A. (2008) Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, [online] PDF. Available from:http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom’s%20Digital%20Taxonomy (Accessed March 8, 2011).

Conner, M. (2009) Introducing Informal Learning, [online]. Available from: http://marciaconner.com/intros/informal.html(Accessed June 11, 2009).

Ducheneaut, N. et al. (2007) ‘The Life And Death of Online Gaming Communities: A Look at Guilds in World of Warcraft’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI 2007), San Jose, CA, United States, April 28 – May 3, ACM. pp:839-848. Also available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240750.

Entertainment Software Association (2010) 2010 Essential Facts about the Comnputer and Video Game Industry,Entertainment Software Association. Available from: http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp (Accessed March 8, 2011).

Gee, J.P. (2007) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. 2nd edition. New York, NY, United States:Palgrave Macmillan.

Gillepsie, L. (2011) World of Warcraft in School, [online]. Available from:http://wowinschool.pbworks.com/w/page/5268731/FrontPage (Accessed March 14, 2011).

Gladwell, M. (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success. Kindle edition. Penguin Group.

Hagel, J. & Brown, J.S. (2009) ‘How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation’ Business Week Online, January 14 [Online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2009/id20090114_362962.htm (Accessed March 14, 2011).

Hoyle, M.A. (2009) ‘World of Warcraft and Me: A True Confession’, E1n1verse – WoW, Learning, and Teaching by Michelle A. Hoyle, blog entry posted August 4, 2009. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org/2009/08/04/world-of-warcraft-and-me-a-true-confession/ (Accessed July 15, 2010).

Irdeen, Myndflame & Gameriot. (2010) Boom de Yada WoW – Eng Subtitles, [online] Video, YouTube. Available from:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOZBU257ERE (Accessed March 14, 2011).

Jenkins, H. (2004) ‘Reality Bytes: Eight Myths about Video Games Debunked’, The Video Game Revolution, blog entry posted 2004. Available from: http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html (Accessed March 8, 2011).

Krathwohl, D.R. (2002) ‘A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview’ Theory into Practice, 41 (4), [Online] Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2 (Accessed March 8, 2011).

Lazzaro, N. (2004) Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion without Story, XEODesign, Inc. Available from:http://www.xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf (Accessed February 12, 2011).

Lenhart, A. et al. (2008) Teens, Video Games, and Civics, Pew Internet & American Life Project. Available from:http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Teens-Video-Games-and-Civics.aspx (Accessed February 21, 2010).

McGonigal, J. (2011a) ‘Introduction’, in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Kindle edition. Vintage Digital.

McGonigal, J. (2011b) ‘Chapter 1: What Exactly Is a Game?’, in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Kindle edition. Vintage Digital.

McGonigal, J. (2011c) ‘Chapter 2: The Rise of the Happiness Engineers’, in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Kindle edition. Vintage Digital.

McGonigal, J. (2011d) ‘Chapter 3: More Satisfying Work’, in Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Kindle edition. Vintage Digital.

McNiff, J. (2002) Action Research for Professional Development: Concise Advice to New Action Researchers, 3rd edition, [Online] Available from: http://www.jeanmcniff.com/booklet1.html (Accessed June 23, 2010).

Meloni, W. (2010) ‘The Next Frontier – Female Gaming Demographics’, Gamasutra, blog entry posted 2010. Available from:http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/WandaMeloni/20100330/4812/The_Next_Frontier__Female_Gaming_Demographics.php

Momsen, J.L. et al. (2010) ‘Just the Facts? Introductory Undergraduate Biology Courses Focus on Low-Level Cognitive Skills’, CBE-Life Sciences Education, 9 (Winter 2010), pp:435-440. Also available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.10-01-0001 (Accessed March 14, 2011).

NPR Staff. (2011) A Lack of Rigor Leaves Students ‘Adrift’ in College, [online] NPR. Available from:http://www.npr.org/2011/02/09/133310978/in-college-a-lack-of-rigor-leaves-students-adrift (Accessed March 14, 2011).

South Park Digital Studios. (n.d.) South Park Studios UK and Ireland – Preparing for Battle, [online] Clip from Season 10, Episode 8. Available from: http://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/clips/sp_vid_155271/ (Accessed March 11, 2011).

The Nielsen Company. (2009) ‘Average TV Viewing for 2008-09 TV Season at All-Time High’, Nielsen Wire, blog entry posted November 10, 2009, 2009. Available from: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/media_entertainment/average-tv-viewing-for-2008-09-tv-season-at-all-time-high/ (Accessed March 12, 2011).

Wenger, E. (2008) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York, NY, United States:Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, E. (2006) Communities of Practice: A Brief Introduction, [online] web page. Available from:http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm (Accessed February 21, 2010).

Wikipedia. (2011) Wide World of Sports (U.S. TV Series), [online] Wikipedia. Available from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_World_of_Sports_(U.S._TV_series) (Accessed March 16, 2011).

WoWHead. (2011) WoWHead: Database: Quests, [online]. Available from: http://www.wowhead.com/quests (Accessed March 16, 2011).

Yee, N. (2004) Player Demographics, [online] The Daedalus Gateway. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html (Accessed March 14, 2011).

Yee, N. (2005a) Playing with Someone, [online] The Daedalus Gateway. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001468.php (Accessed March 14, 2011).

Yee, N. (2005b) WoW Basic Demographics, [online] The Daedalus Gateway. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php (Accessed November 2, 2011).

Yee, N. (2005c) MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours, [online]. The Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000891.php (Accessed February 21, 2010).

Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php(Accessed February 16, 2011).

Citing

Here are author-date references for the different versions of this material:

• Original talk: Hoyle, M.A. (2011) ‘Persist or Die! Learning in World of Warcraft’, presented at Game To Learn: Take 2, Dundee, Scotland, March 17 – March 19. Also available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Eingang/persist-or-die-learning-in-world-of-warcraft.
• Slides: Hoyle, M.A. (2011) Persist or Die! Learning in World of Warcraft, [online] Slide presentation (with notes). Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Eingang/persist-or-die-learning-in-world-of-warcraft.
• This version: Hoyle, M.A. (2012) ‘Persist or Die! Learning in World of Warcraft’. WoW, Learning, and Teaching by Michelle A. Hoyle blog entry posted August 8, 2012. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org//2012/08/08/persist-or-die/.
• PDF blog version: Hoyle, M.A. (2011) Persist or Die! Learning in World of Warcraft. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org/files/2012/08/Hoyle_2011_Persist_or_Die.pdf.

Version Information

• V3, November 28, 2011: Fixed the various Yee citations to point at the correct articles and references. Fixed some conversion errors (but posted July 14, 2012 on WoWLearning.org and August 8, 2012 on Einiverse.eingang.org).
• V2, September 23, 2011: Fixed some conversion errors.
• V1, September 16, 2011: Original version.

WoW Learning Project Questions PDF image

The V.C. was doing a surprise (to us) departmental visit last month. We had a bit of notice and it was decided that everyone doing projects in our research group should produce a one-page summary of their work. This could then be presented to the V.C. I whipped up the following. As I haven’t completed the analysis for my recent survey into motivations in World of Warcraft, I couldn’t include any of that, so I focussed on the underlying ideas in the project.

Downloadable Resources:

• WoW Learning Research Project A4 poster (230 KB PDF)

The 30-second summary: Examine how metaphors and game design of World of Warcraft motivate people to learn and to work, with an eye to transferring motivation, social knowledge building, and persistence to online higher education practices, like community building for lifelong learning.

Click the “More” link below to continue reading the online version of the proposal and progress report. A downloadable PDF version is also available.

What’s Gone Before

“Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, 1905 (2005)

I started my part-time D.Phil in 1996 with Ben du Boulay as my supervisor working on something that was a combination of information retrieval and natural language processing. For various reasons—health, job, personal reasons, etc—I intermitted a lot. As my last intermission period was expiring, I put a great deal of thought into whether I wanted to continue or not. I was loathe to completely give up everything, so I decided to continue doing a Ph.D. but unite my three lifelong interests into something more related to what I actually do: educational technology. I therefore started a new D.Phil with Dr. Judith Good in October of 2009 within my original period of registration.

Research Questions

What do I hope to discover?

There are three primary initial research questions:

1. How is the “Robert and Susan” metaphor applicable to World of Warcraft and what does that gain us in understanding how to successfully encourage lifelong learning and build communities of learning?
2. How does the social structure in-game and out of game resemble a community of practice? How much of a role does social knowing play in the development of expertise and the dissemination of learning? What features would it be useful to adopt when designing learning communities?
3. What encourages game players to persist in learning and working, although many tasks are boring and repetitive, and to continue improving long past their current goal? How does this relate to Hagel and Brown’s (2009) “lessons”?

Roberts and Susans

Hello, my name is Susan. I am bright and highly motivated. I love to learn and to think about things. Robert is taking endless lecture notes until he gets his degree. Robert is very different than me.

The nature of universities and the characteristics of their students are changing. Students no longer arrive on the university’s doorstep intrinsically motivated to learn regardless of the teaching method employed. Tim Clydesdale, sociology professor at the College of New Jersey, describes it this way:

So this… produces a rather odd kind of student — one who appears polite and dutiful but who cares little about the course work, the larger questions it raises, or the value of living an examined life. And it produces such students in overwhelming abundance.
(Clydesdale, 2009)

Clydesdale is giving an example of a “Robert” student, from Biggs and Tang’s “Robert and Susan” student prototypes in higher education (Biggs and Tang, 2007 p.9). Susan learns in a deep way using higher order thinking skills, like theorizing, reflecting, and generating. Robert learns in a surface way using skills at a much lower cognitive level, like note-taking and memorization; he is happy do the minimum to get by. Michael Wesch comments in his recent Britannica blog essay that “…the unquestioned assumption [is] that ‘getting by’ is the name of the game” for students (Wesch, 2008), so he too has noticed the increase in the number of “Roberts”. The difference in learning approaches is expressed eloquently by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott:

There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.
(quoted in Fish, 2009)

What Is Social Learning & Social Knowing

“We participate; therefore we are.” (Brown and Adler, 2008)

What exactly constitutes education or learning? As an educator with a computer science background, I contend that learning is different than knowledge or facts in the same way that data differs from information. Without a context, a fact is just a piece of data. It is only information or learning when it can be applied to something. Biggs and Tang (2007, p.21) are saying something similar, when they say, “The acquisition of information in itself does not bring about [effective learning changes], but the way we structure that information and think with it does.” They go on to say “education is about conceptual change, not just the acquisition of information.”

How do we elicit this conceptual change? How do we elicit this conceptual change? Biggs and Tang enumerate four precursors. The most interesting is the fourth: “[S]tudents work collaboratively and in dialogue with others, both peers and teachers.” (2008) call this “social learning” and explain that “our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions.” This fits in nicely with David Weinberger’s ideas about social knowing:

What you learn isn’t prefiltered and approved, sitting on a shelf, waiting to be consumed… Now we can see for ourselves that knowledge isn’t in our heads: It is between us. It emerges from public and social thought and it stays there, because social knowing, like the global conversations that give rise to it, is never finished.
Weinberger, 2007 p.146-147

Lifelong learning, like Weinberger’s social knowing, is never finished. It continues on outside the four walls of the classroom. It is on Twitter. It is on Facebook. It is in the student’s workplace. It is in the student’s home. It arises in conversations with the student’s friends and it arises in play. The social component, previously undervalued, is key.

Brown describes some research by Richard J. Light where Light discovered that the ability of students to form study groups was one of the strongest determinants of students’ success; it was more important than the instructors’ teaching styles (Light (2001) cited in Brown and Adler, 2008). Brown says this shifts our attention from the subject content to the learning activities and human interactions around them, which, while agreeing with Biggs, goes further by suggesting the instructor themselves is of lesser importance. Susan and Robert, becoming social, taking turns being teachers and learners together, is a powerful combination for deep learning.

World of Warcraft

The gamer’s mindset—the fact that they are learning in a totally new way—means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not just for consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.” (Wright, 2006)

World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiple online role playing game (MMORPG) in the dungeons and dragons genre, is the most successful personal computer game ever released. As of 2008, it had more than 10 million active subscribers worldwide, amounting to 62.2% of the online gaming market (Yee, 2005).

Although it is a game, WoW, its communities, and its cultural artefacts share a number of commonalities with lifelong learning in online higher education. The first is that both have Roberts and Susans. The second is that both have structures that support ad-hoc groups where alliances shift, merge, and collapse dynamically as people come and go. The third is that both encourage the formation of communities of practice through their design and purposes (Wenger, 1999). Finally, they both, with varying degrees of success, encourage learning and collaboration that results in an ongoing learning journey continuing past the current goal.

Hagel and Brown (2009) enumerate eight “lessons” that businesses hoping to get their employees to collaborate, create, and innovate should draw from World of Warcraft:

1. Reduce barriers to entry and to advance in initial stages
2. Provide rich performance metrics
3. Keep raising the bar
4. Remember to account for and use intrinsic motivations
5. Provide opportunities to develop shared knowledge not easily shared but don’t forget broader knowledge exchange
6. Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging goals
7. Encourage frequent performance feedback
8. Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

These lessons are just as applicable in fostering collaborative learning in online education and lifelong learning as in business, perhaps even more so. My mission is to discover how it applies.

Major Activities Undertaken

Making connections, forging links, firing neurons.

It was a fairly busy period. I attended a number of seminars, workshops and conferences, either in person or virtually (see Table 1). Some presentations were previously recorded.

Although I have been teaching computing science and technology in higher education for over 14 years, I do not have a background or formal training in education. I decided to alleviate that in September by registering for H812: The Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice at The Open University, a 60-point course in their online distance education masters program. Upon completion, I will have my Higher Education Academy accreditation for teaching in HE. Prior to that point, I had already agreed to teach H810: Accessibility Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students, another course in the online distance education program. It was, in fact, applying for a teaching post for this course that led me to decide to rekindle my Ph.D. by changing to something I already do: educational technology.

Teaching a pilot course is always a lot of work, especially one where you have a background in half the content—technology—but not necessarily in the other half—educational pedagogy. I spent quite a lot of time in the fall working through the course on my own, just ahead of my students. I have also been dipping into the material for another brand new course: H800: Technology-Enhanced Learning: Practices and Debates, a new course that just started this year, co-authored by Gráinne Conole. What all these courses have in common is exposure to different ideas in educational technology and pedagogy. From the accessibility and e-learning course, I picked up ideas about Wenger’s communities of practice, which I have incorporated into my thinking. From H800, I have been exploring ideas about digital natives and “the Google Generation”. From H809: Practice-Based Research in Educational Technology, I’ve acquired some guided readings on ethnography as a research method, which I suspect is one of the types of study I need to use for studying behaviour within World of Warcraft.

It is the course I am actually taking that has proven the most useful, though, as it has a guided introduction to many pedagogical theories, especially constructive alignment from Biggs & Tang (Brown & Adler, 2008). That material was directly usable in the book chapter proposal I submitted earlier this year, the bulk of which is now incorporated into this document.

For the second assignment, I did some analysis on a course I chair, examining how outcomes-based learning and teaching, a kind of constructive alignment, has not been properly employed in the course design and how that has resulted in students failing to persist and pass the course. That piece of research served as the basis for my recent “Making Connections” conference presentation. That assignment also included ideas about Robert and Susan and the increase in the number of Roberts, as well as the current nature and purpose of universities. Building on that analysis and inspired by Constance Steinkuehler’s work on scientific literacy practices in World of Warcraft communities, I developed an activity intended to improve academic literacy practices in my Open Source third-year students, and then evaluated the effect on demonstrated practices in their course practices; I presented some of those findings during my “Making Connections” talk, The Nutcracker Effect.

That Open Source course I chaired this year has fed into my thinking in other ways too as a direct result of my ongoing fascination with the ideas of John Seely Brown. In a keynote speech I watched, he was comparing evaluating the influence of “tinkering” on Open Source and how that ties into learning. One of my students innocently made a comment about how Open Source is very similar to learning too. It got me thinking about how tinkering is directly applicable to problem-based learning as well as deep learning, both topics related to activities I see taking place in World of Warcraft and ones I want to encourage in communities of practice for learning.

I do not spend time looking for relevant course materials. In actuality, useful material from other courses came to my attention because of people in my online personal learning networks with whom I interact via Twitter and Plurk primarily. That includes people like Gráinne Conole (OU), Martin Weller (OU), George Siemens (Manitoba), Bryan Alexander (NITLE), Howard Rheingold (Stanford), Steve Wheeler (Plymouth), Tony Hirst (OU), and Alan Cann (Leicester). I am also connected and in regular contact with a number of other Ph.D. students and researchers around the world, both in e-learning and games research.

Not all of the seminars and workshops I attended were immediately obviously applicable, although people I have met at them have fed into my work, like K. Faith’s Lawrence’s and her Ph.D. work on fan fiction and artifact production in LiveJournal communities (2008); or practices that encourage motivation and persistence from an Open University staff workshop. Ben du Boulay’s motivation reading group was also very helpful by picking out important theory papers from psychology and cognitive science in motivation, a topic I did not initially realize was of interest until I started regularly attending those meetings. Now motivation is a key element of what I want to investigate.

Progression and the Future

There’s much left to explore.

My immediate plan is to complete a literature review and formal thesis proposal by the end of October. That means a summer spent reading. I have some good starting points, both in e-learning, motivation, and game-related to learning areas, including Constance Steinkuehler’s World of Warcraft literacy research and Bonnie Nardi’s work. There is also more to read on John Seely Brown’s ideas on information spaces, learning, and tinkering. I feel I am in a good position to start and make good progress on that without getting too lost. I also can draw upon the advice and recommendations of others in my personal learning network, if need be.

I am anticipating at least three studies to complete my Ph.D. work. The first is a beta study to test out the research and data methodology for a larger-scale study in World of Warcraft. At this point, it is not clear whether the study will be an ethnographic study occurring in World of Warcraft directly or some other kind of research, like discourse analysis, on related artifacts like forums and web sites. That will be more evident after the thesis proposal has been written and I have a clearer idea of what specific questions I want the study to answer, perhaps after consultation with Dr. Ruth Woodfield from Sociology. However, I do know that I am looking for metaphors and systems for motivation and persistence that can be transported into an e-learning communities of practice environment. The second study would be the actual large-scale study intended to gather sufficient data to answer the posed questions.

The third study would take the hypothesis of motivation and persistence gained from the World of Warcraft studies and apply it to a subject online student population for positive improvements. I hope to facilitate something through my current connections at the Open University. This would be a good route as the student population in my undergraduate courses are quite large and could be divided into control and experimental groups. If an OU group is not possible, using a smaller group from Dr. Good’s online e-learning cohort might work. I am in the process of sounding out various people already at the Open University as to how I would go about obtaining permission to do that.

I am also actively looking for small JISC grant projects in related areas that I can apply for on my own. Dr. Tony Hirst (OU) has apparently figured out a way by which universities can be bypassed when applying for JISC funds, thus avoiding the universities annexing up to half for fixed costs out of an already small amount. He has already done this with one of his own projects (Winn, 2009), but I will admit he is in a better position than I am to pull it off. Still, it does not hurt to look and to try.

In addition to obtaining funding, another benefit of research grants is that they expect output, usually in the form of published papers or other documents. That would tie nicely into my plans to do a thesis comprised of a collection of papers (published or unpublished) as already permitted in Psychology at Sussex. With my attention deficit disorder, I feel this approach will be a lot easier for me to manage, as individual papers are self-contained and smaller units. My plan is to publish several papers. The initial research questions I have already could form at least one and the two major studies another two. The argument would be that published papers have already undergone some sort of peer review and, by publication, obtained far wider public exposure than most Ph.D. theses ever get. Dr. Good and Dr. Whitby are responsible for making this possible (or attempting to do so) on the departmental side. I would like to see the option available to everyone, but I am confident I should be able to get it as a reasonable accommodation for my disability.

My intention is to complete by spring of 2011. I will include a tentative timeline of things to be done and when in my thesis proposal at the end of October. In order to complete in 2011, I will need to make a change to my registration status as I am officially out of time in January 2010. I spoke to the postgraduate advisor at the beginning of the year. She believed the department would work with me to either restart my registration period or extend my current one. I am in the process of trying to get that sorted prior to the decommissioning of the school later this summer.

References

Biggs, J. & Tang, C. (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd edition, Maidenhead, UK, Open University Press.

Blandeburgo, B. (2009)> ‘Activision “WoWs,” But Where’s Wireless?’, The Game Trade Journal, blog entry posted March 4, 2009. Available from: http://www.gametradejournal.com/2009/03/activision-wows-but-wheres-wireless.html (Accessed March 9, 2009).

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008) ‘Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0’ Educause Review, 43 (1), [online] Available from: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823 (Accessed August 22, 2008).

Churches, A. (2008) Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, [online] PDF. Available from: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom’s%20Digital%20Taxonomy (Accessed January 20, 2009).

Clydesdale, T. (2009) ‘Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology’, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2009, [online]. Available from: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i20/20b00701.htm (Accessed January 23, 2009).

Fish, S. (2009) ‘Think Again’, The New York Times, blog entry posted January 18, 2009. Available from: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/ (Accessed January 22, 2009).

Hagel, J. & Seely, J.S. (2009) ‘How World of Warcraft Promotes Innovation’ Business Week Online, January 14 [online] Available from: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jan2009/id20090114_362962.htm (Accessed January 19, 2009).

Krathwohl, D.R. (2002) ‘A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview’ Theory into Practice, 41 (4), [online] Available from: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1207/s15430421tip4104_2 (Accessed January 12, 2009).

Lawrence, K.F. (2008) The Web of Community Trust – Amateur Fiction Online: A Case Study in Community Focused Design for the Semantic Web. Ph.D. thesis, University of Southampton.

Weinberger, D. (2007) Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, New York, USA, Holt Paperbacks.

Santayana, G. (2005) The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress, Project Gutenberg, [online] Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15000/15000-h/15000-h.htm

Wenger, E. (1999) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.

Wesch, M. (2008) ‘A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)’, Britannica.com, blog entry posted October 21, 2008. Available from: http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/10/a-vision-of-students-today-what-teachers-must-do/ (Accessed October 21, 2008).

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Downloadable Resources:
-A4 PDF Version of Levelling Lifelong Learning: Progress Report 2008/2009 (612 KB)

These are my slides for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the “Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning”. The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education. Each slide has been annotated based on my presentation preparation notes. A downloadable version is available.

Title Slide

Title slide for my August 19th interview presentation. I was given the remit of presenting a five- to ten-minute presentation on the “Challenges Affecting Disabled in E-Learning”. The interview was for an associate lecturer position on the new H810: Accessible online learning: supporting disabled students postgraduate course, part of the M.A. in online distance education.

E-Learning Challenges

I ran across this paper from Educause Quarterly by John Campbell and Diana Oblinger about the top ten challenges for teaching and learning for 2007. I guess they had to wait until 2007 was almost over before knowing what those challenges were because this didn’t appear until November.

I was particularly struck by issue number four: “Selecting Models and Strategies for E-Learning”. One of the key questions posed there was “What are the learners’ characteristics (educational preparation, desired outcomes, preferred delivery modality, technology, skills, services, and support needed?” This was intended for general e-learning, but I think it’s even more important to e-learning for the disabled.

Range of Disabilities

There’s a wide spectrum of disabilities that people might present with in
higher education, especially with e-learning.

Many people, when thinking about disabilities, probably think of the more
common, visible disabilities in the lower left-hand quadrant: sensory
disabilities, like hearing impairments, visual impairments — including
colour blindness — and speech impairments; or perhaps they think of
the various kinds of mobility impairments: quadriplegics or paraplegics.

I’d rather focus on the more unusual or “invisible” disabilities. For example,
I think we should include RSI — repetitive stress injury –
as that’s a mobility disability that’s affecting an increasing number
of people and presents issues for e-learning.

In the upper left-hand corner, I have the autistic spectrum, with
Aspergers, autism, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
which I have myself. These bring with them their own requirements for
information presentation and processing.

Finally, in the right-hand quadrant, the various learning
disabilities, many of which may co-occur with disorders in the
autistic spectrum: dyslexia, dyscalculia — difficulty in learning or
understanding mathematics — dysgraphia–difficulty in the ability to write — and
dyspraxia, the partial loss of the ability to coordinate and perform certain
purposeful movements and gestures.

I have specifically omitted mental disorders like bipolar disorder and
depression, as they don’t affect the presentation or access to learning so
much.

Challenges (1)

So what are some of the challenges affecting the disabled in e-learning? One of them is the variety of interfaces and how accessible those interfaces are to
various disabilities.

At the top we have Plurk, a microblogging service like Twitter,
where you have 140 characters to explore what you’re doing now. Unlike
Twitter, Plurk is threaded (see the threaded example inset) and is
displayed on a timeline. The interface, though, is quirky and
difficult to use by non-disabled on portable devices, like the iPhone.
If you had a mobility problem, with all the fine clicking and
moving of the mouse to choose between different threads, Plurk would be
very difficult to use. Twitter, in comparison, is very linear, and accessible
to people on different devices and those using assistive software.

On the bottom is Seesmic’s interface. Seesmic is a video blogging or
a video conversation site.

Some of the interface issues can be overcome by better design. Unfortunately,
we don’t always have control over the design of materials used in e-learning.
I just read about a new adaptive interface system called Supple, presented by
Dan Weld et al. at this year’s AAAI convention in Chicago in July. If you’ve
ever used a Palm Pilot, you might recall that the first thing it asks you to do
is tap the screen in various corners, so it can calibrate how accurate you are
pointing on the screen with the stylus. Supple does something similar but
with user interfaces and then can rearrange the interface elements to accommodate
motor problems, for example. Dan Weld’s team indicated that one of potential
application areas for this was web pages and I know that Niall Sclater at the Open University is already interested in it for exactly that.

Challenges (2)

Closely related to different interfaces is the multiple methods of
content delivery possible in e-learning: slides, spreadsheets,
PDF documents, word processing documents, and audio-video
presentations. Each of which presents its own accessibility issues.

Some of them require special equipment, like book readers or
screen readers or mobility assist devices to aid in pointing, typing,
or clicking. Some of this equipment is very expensive, so there’s an
issue of financial accessibility as well.

Challenges (3)

Once media accessibility has been addressed, there are still the traditional
issues around content support. This is a challenge that all students
face.

Disabled students may also have a challenge in finding adequate support
for their specialized assistive software or equipment. At the Open
University, a student’s tutor is often their first port of call for problems,
so it’s not unreasonable to expect some ideas about how to solve common
technical issues or know where to point students for help.

Challenges (4)

More so than other students, disabled students are more likely to
suffer from emotional issues related to returning to study or
taking university courses via distance education. That might include
doing too much or too little, perfectionism (not that I know anything
about that!), not wanting to be a special case, confidence, and
self-image problems. The last three are particularly common.

Challenges (5)

A familiar problem to everyone in distance education is that of
students feeling isolated. This is a not-so-familiar problem for
undergraduate students at traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions
and very familiar for many disabled who may have spent a lifetime already
feeling “different” and left out.

The good news here is that a lot of the isolation can be overcome
with Learning 2.0, a topic I’ll return to later on in the presentation.

Modes of Delivery

E-learning modes of content delivery can be broken down into
three areas: Web 2.0, Web 1.0, and printed materials. Web 2.0 can be
thought of as the new, more interactive types of web site and
online activities: Plurk/Twitter, blogs and wikis, Second Life, the video
sites like Seesmic, YouTube, and Flickr. It can also include things
like podcasts, an area the Open University has recently joined in
partnership with iTunes U. These allow people to create content, often
collaboratively, and then easily share it with others who may then
modify it or comment on it.

Web 1.0 is typified by traditional, static web pages,
converted PowerPoint presentations, and PDF documents. The possibilities for
interactivity are very minimal. This is a very traditional and common way
of presenting material online and probably not about to be supplanted
completely by Web 2.0 applications in the near future.

And, as much as we’d like to claim we’re a paperless university, the
truth of the matter is we still have books and other printed materials.
Web-based content can be made accessible sometimes with screen readers. Even
with book readers, though, sometimes printed content is inaccessible. For example,
on TT281, our course text had commentary in inset blocks and code on the rest
of the page. Our blind student was unable to “read” the book satisfactory because
of the layout. We contacted the publisher but, because of when we were first
alerted to the problem, there was insufficient time to have something appropriate
made available.

I just read about two recent initiatives by JISC TechDis, the Publishers
Association, and the RNIB that might help in such situations. The first is
“Publisher Lookup UK” where participating publishers provide contact
addresses for having special arrangements of their materials made available.
The second initiative is a guide to obtaining textbooks in alternative forms,
providing advice on where to go, what to expect, and what questions to ask.

Long-Tail Learning

Wikis, blogs, and social networking sites can help form the backbone of
Learning 2.0, synonymous with long-tail learning. I first read about this
back in January this year in another Educause article called
“Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail and Learning 2.0“.
In this article, Brown et al. discuss how 80% of sales in a bookstore
come from 20% of the titles. That’s the fat part of the “tail.” Amazon,
Chapters, and Borders turned that around by offering a huge selection, so
large that the majority of their sales actually comes from the “long tail” of the
sales curve. In education, content delivery is the fat part of the “tail”
but the “long tail” comes from people’s interactions with learning and knowledge.

So in “long-tail learning”, Brown says that learning is a social activity
and that understanding is socially constructed. This is contrasted with
E-Learn 1.0, which was
Cartesian learning, where knowledge is substance. That is, teachers
impart “knowledge” to their students who somehow “learn it”. Learning is a
commodity to be boxed up and distributed.

Social networks are a strong, positive force here, especially for the disabled
as they’re not restricted from participating by their disabilities, unlike
possibly real-world social networking. We know that students benefit from
study groups, because they engage more with the material. Blogs, wikis, and
social networks offer a powerful opportunity for the disabled.

E-Learn 2.0 Opportunity

I think e-learning for the disabled isn’t so much a challenge as
an opportunity to provide a level playing field. However, that
opportunity will only be there if we remember certain things.
The first is to adhere to standards, like those
proposed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and WebAIM. Stay away from technologies that are accessibility unfriendly, like
Flash, or provide alternative access to the content if it’s core to the
learning experience.

It’s an opportunity if we focus on accessibility, both in terms of
access to the content and in terms of the content itself. I haven’t spoken a lot about web-based
accessibility as I teach courses here at the Open University and author
course content on it, discussed in my original application and in my CV, but
I will add the following comments about content: write
clearly and comprehensibly, and use white space appropriately; engage in sensible paragraph planning paragraphs for
those with attentional or focussing difficulties. Accessibility
isn’t just about the disabled. Paying attention to these details
benefits everyone.

Finally, it’s an opportunity if we remember our primary motivation:

Primary Motivation

Teach, yes, but also foster a willingness (and ability) to learn and to continue
to learn.

In conclusion, lifelong learning is compatible with long-tail learning. Social networks can go on long after the “course” ends. E-learning does have challenges for the disabled, but it’s also a
great opportunity to move forward by using E-Learn 2.0 and Web 2.0 in a
focussed, accessible way.

Downloadable Resources:
- A4 PDF Version of H810 Interview Talk on Challenges Affecting the Disabled in E-Learning (1.5 MB)

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