Image: I can just imagine this Blood Furnace boss exhorting people “L2P!” as he kills them over and over.

It is day two of the writing regime. Today’s plan is writing 750 words, writing CMA feedback, and working on the paper. I was musing last night about the approach to the paper, thinking that having an abstract or an introduction actually makes it easier to write because it provides a focus for the paper’s direction. I have heard other people say that it makes sense to leave the introduction to the last because then you know what you’ve written. I think the former approach might be more sensible for me. I can always go back and revise the introduction if it does not reflect what I end up doing. Focus, however, is priceless.

In addition to an introduction or an abstract, a title might also help. I was experimenting with variants of “L2P! Learn To Play Or…”. I thought that was clever, as it’s something you often see more experienced, impatient players saying to players who they think are not living up to their expectations in terms of expertise or speed. In the context of my work, however, it probably makes more sense to say “P2L! Play To Learn”, but I’m not sure how many people will get that. Nevertheless, a title is a starting point. I had both before I started my keynote writing and that turned out well. Perhaps I can incorporate the factoid into the abstract.

Abstract:

“L2P! L2P!” This is the exhortation you might encounter in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) when other players around you believe your skill or speed in playing is inadequate. It means “learn to play”. In this paper, we demonstrate how L2P has been turned on its axis to yoke the trials of play to the game of learning. 39 World of Warcraft players primarily playing in Europe submitted essays answering the question “Why do you play World of Warcraft?” in a 2010 study.

Using a grounded theory approach and discourse analysis, the essays were analyzed to ascertain the contributors’ motivations for playing and their reasons for persisting in playing. Yee’s player motivational framework subcomponents (Yee 2005; Yee 2006) were applied to each essay and contrasted with Bartle’s original player typology (Bartle 1996; Bartle 2003) in aggregate to determine overall, general motives these players had. While participants were not asked to write explicitly about learning and many did not provide any examples, several contributions are examined here as case studies of mundane and unusual examples, illustrating what these adults are playing to learn–a learning that goes beyond dungeons, dragons, and dwarves.

That does not seem too bad as a first go. I need to check on the discourse analysis; it might not be completely true. I also have no idea how I am going to write up the grounded theory bit appropriately, but at least that is accurate. I definitely followed that kind of approach in tagging the essays. I need to find some time to pore through the James Paul Gee’s book on discourse analysis. I just saw someone else in #phdchat mention it again yesterday. It keeps cropping up and I keep not reading it, even after I went to buy it and then realized I already had. That is trying to tell me something, if I would only listen. I also need to check on what to call Yee’s framework.

References:

Bartle, R. (1996) ‘Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs’, Journal of MUD Research, 1 (1). Also available from: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (Accessed April 22, 2011).

Bartle, R. (2003) Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Publishing.

Yee, N. (2005) A Model of Player Motivations, [online] Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=1 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Yee, N. (2006) ‘Motivations for Play in Online Games’, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9 (6), pp:772-775. Also available from: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) built a Google custom search engine that scraped the profiles of Twitter users employing the #altc2010 hashtag for website addresses.  For a laugh, I typed in “World of Warcraft”, not expecting much to show up other than myself.  Well, I was there, but so was mention of a poster and a talk entitled “Cultural Capital and Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying (Massively Multiplayer Guild Culture as a Model for e-L:earning)” at the 2007 Alt-C conference by David White.  That pointed me to an Alt-C talk and a GLS one in 2007.  So, not long before I started my Ph.D., David was already out there talking about this.  Ouch!  The “ouch” part is that I met him earlier this year at a gaming-related discussion panel.  He was chairing my table, but  we were discussing  digital residents and visitors.  David follows me on Twitter too!  World of Warcraft has never come up.

The abstract mentions guilds, World of Warcraft, social capital, and communities of practice.  His description is eerily similar to my current focus.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a matching paper for the talk.  There’s just the GLS 2007 26-minute talk embedded in the blog pos from Tall Blog.  I’d best add this to my list of things to investigate soon.  It sounds very, very relevant.  Perhaps he has something I can build on or I will obtain some ideas on how to differentiate my work.  I am also interested in seeing his ethnographic approach and what he discovered.  This is a challenge, not a disaster.  There is always something different you can do.  You just need to find it.

The requirements to complete the “Insane in the Membrane” achievement.
Image from WoWWiki (2009)

I want to say something about the kinds of motivations people have for playing World of Warcraft. Specifically, I want to enumerate factors that motivate players to persist in the game even when it involves tasks that are repetitive, boring, or seemingly impossibly long.

For example, there’s an achievement in World of Warcraft called “Insane in the Membrane” that gives the completer a reward of an in-game title of “The Insane.” This achievement requires you to raise your reputation points with different game factions to exalted, the highest level. Generally, you need about 21,000 points to reach exalted. Points are gained by completing quests, collecting and turning in items, or sometimes killing certain types of things. If you only had to gain exalted reputation with one or two factions, this would not be difficult. However, you need to do this with eight different factions, most of which are not factions you would be accruing large amounts of reputation with during the normal course of play.

To increase the difficulty, several of the factions involved have rival factions. With those factions, as you gain reputation with one, you lose reputation points with the rival faction, making the process of completing this achievement complex in addition to time-consuming. The WoWWiki (2009) page describes some strategies for completing this achievement and the complexities of the faction-rival relationships.

Most tasks players undertake are not going to be as complex, time-consuming, or mind-numbing to complete as the aptly-named “Insane in the Membrane”. There are, however, many smaller day-to-day activities necessary for successful raiding or to get some particular piece of gear, such as doing daily quests to earn gold, or harvesting materials for potions or enchantments, or completing instance and after instance to get badge rewards or reputation rewards. I’m making it sound like getting achievements or gear is the be-all, end-all, but I think the situation is more complex than that. It’s that hypothesis I want to verify.

Other things I would like to be able to comment on include the relationships between gender and motivation, or motivation and age, or possibly even motivation and nationality. I do not necessarily believe there will be a relationship between motivation and nationality necessarily, but how can you definitively say if you do not look for the correlation? That gives me the following questions I want answered:

1. What motivates people to play World of Warcraft?
2. What motivates people to persist in very boring or difficult tasks?
3. Is there a relationship between gender and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
4. Is there a relationship between age and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
5. Is there a relationship between nationality and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
6. Is there a relationship between character roles and classes and motivation?

With those six questions in mind and the original study idea of determining motivation via analysis of free-form essays about motivation, I can now go ahead and develop the specific survey questions that will help elicit data to answer those questions.

Going back to considering my approach-whether I should start with planning versus start with survey question-it was not as clearcut as I expected. By starting with some potential survey questions and then thinking about the answers I would get from them, I gained a better idea about what answers I wanted, a kind of iterative development process. Sometimes putting the horse first helps you know where and how to put the cart!

References:

WoWWiki. (2009) Insane in the Membrane, [online] WoWWiki. Available from http://www.wowwiki.com/Insane_in_The_Membrane (Accessed November 6, 2009).

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).

Winn, J. (2009) ‘JISCPress: Developing a Community Platform for the JISC Funding Process’, The Learning Lab, blog entry posted June 5, 2009. Available from: http://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/06/05/jiscpress-developing-a-community-platform-for-the-jisc-funding-process/ (Accessed June 5, 2009).

Wright, W. (2006) ‘Dream Machines’, Wired, 14.04

Woodcock, B.S. (2008a) MMOGCHART.Com, [online]. Available from: http://www.mmogchart.com/ (Accessed March 8, 2009).

Woodcock, B.S. (2008b) An Analysis of MMOG Subscription Growth: Version 23.0, [online]. Available from: http://www.mmogchart.com/analysis-and-conclusions/ (Accessed March 8, 2009).

Yee, N. (2004) Player Demographics, [online] The Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_demographics.html (Accessed March 9, 2009).

Yee, N. (2005) ‘WoW Basic Demographics’, The Daedalus Project, blog entry posted July 28, 2005. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001365.php (Accessed March 9, 2009).

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

Q: What are you doing?

A: Looking at 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 distance education practices, like teaching and community building.

There you go. Now we all know!

I’d just like to point out, though, that my ability to verbalize it so coherently and concisely is a result of all the other writing and thinking I’ve been doing. If I hadn’t written the essay in November and the extremely rough paper outline for a thesis proposal on Sunday, the idea would not have coalesced so concretely. Time, background cogitation and serendipity seem to be strong features of my new Ph.D. For me, not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, has been sharply focussed by talking, reading, writing, and going to seminars. It doesn’t matter what the seminars were or how relevant. It’s amazing how much I’ve drawn out of the motivational reading group I was participating in when I didn’t even know I was interested in motivation. Connections appear where you least expect them. The important thing is to take the leap and do.