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.

Elsheindra the Druid

I have been reading slowly but surely through James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Learning and Literacy over the last six months. The following is based on notes I took for my research journal while reading Chapter 3 on learning and identity. In particular, I focus on the notion of the tripartite identity and what that means to me in the real world and in the virtual world in which I play.

Role playing games involve three identities: you, the real-world person, who is playing a role-played character; the role-played character, a virtual identity played by you; and a projective identity, the interface between you and the virtual identity, where you project your values onto the virtual character and see the virtual character as a personal project under your control. This is Gee’s notion of the tripartite identity. Gee differentiates between these by emphasizing different parts of the phrase “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead”. “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead” is the real-world Gee. “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead” is the virtual world character. Finally, “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead” is the projective identity.

The projective identity involves meta-reflection. You consider what kind of “person” you want your role-played character to be. Gee (2007, p. 51) comments that “A good role-playing video game makes me think new thoughts about what I value and what I do not.” The virtual character’s history and future is all part of the projective identity. “[you] feel responsible to and for the character.” (p. 53)

“When you have chosen a video game well, the virtual world it allows you to live in is quite compelling.” (Gee 2007, p. 59) Gee asserts that if the virtual world and the player’s virtual identity are not compelling then little deep learning will occur, because the player is not invested in mastering the domain. That is, they see little point or reward to investing effort, time, or practice required for domain mastery. What makes the realm compelling varies from player to player and even at different times. I know from my own experience that I initially was enthralled by the amazing and expansive world created in World of Warcraft. These days, however, I am interested in teamwork and achieving goals, so I spend very little time admiring the fantastic scenery or engaging in exploration.

High stone pillar adjacent to the Druid’s Temple near Ilton

If the virtual identity and world map onto your real world identity and experiences, that also helps make a game compelling. As an educator who specializes in online distance education, part of my key real-world identity is community builder. One of the first things I did in World of Warcraft was create a guild and start building a community. I later expanded on that by helping form and run an alliance of social guilds, an even larger community. People and the ability to help people was a strong compelling factor that the game afforded me, bridging my real-world and virtual identities.

It is clear how the game itself was able to map onto my real-world skills and identity, but it is probably not so obvious how that is woven into my virtual identity. My first character, which I still primarily use, was Elsheindra, a night elf druid. As Michelle, I am keenly interested in helping people, which is why I enjoy teaching so much. As Elsheindra, I could be a restoration druid, a healer. Not only does this enable me to help people by healing them or making them stronger, it ties into my original desire to be a doctor. As Michelle who grew up in Canada and spent a lot of time hiking and camping, I have a deep love for trees and green, something I think is epitomized by the druid class, as druids in the game lore are keepers of the world and masters of nature, similar to Celtic associations. As a result, Elsheindra, for many years, did not kill things. Partially because healing druids were really poor at it, but also because I didn’t think it was appropriate for a healer to be gratuitously taking lives when she is supposed to be devoted to saving them. That was not who I wanted Elsheindra to be, a clear example Gee’s projective identity.

References:

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

Images:

• Elsheindra the Druid ©Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.
• Druid Temple ©Phil Catterall licensed for reuse under CC-BY-SA.

In the actual experiment, I gave Basil the following three essays:

Essay 1:
At first it was a way of keeping in touch with friends after I’d moved away. But I made more new friends throughthe online gaming community that occurs around the game. I’ve met a good number of my fellow guild members, including my guild leader and most of the other officers. To me, game has always been about exploring, storylines and the exotic locales presented therein. That’s all secondary to killing bosses, and trudging through raids really.

Essay 2:
I play WoW and other MMORPGS for the simple reason that I’m intrigued by the online community and game play aspects. WoW is my particular favourite that I return to again and again. I believe the reasoning behind this is the friendly community that has matured to quite a size over the number of years I’ve been playing. In addition to the community I find the story lines within the game interesting, challenging and sometimes, dare I say it, exciting. By exciting I mean, that like a good book, you want to see what is going to happen next!

Originally I started playing WoW for the simply reason it was an MMORPG. I was intrigued by the genre and WoW was really one of the first to be highlighted through the media, etc. As I progressed in the game, I discovered that it was a great way to relax after a busy day. As a form of escapism, it helped with relieving stress.

Now I rarely get to play WoW or any other MMORPG for that matter, however, for the same reasons of relaxation, online community, exciting stories, I still try to play as regularly as I can.

Essay 3:
Originally I moved to WoW simply because the majority of my guild had moved from DAoC, when WoW was released it was the next game that the existing guild members were collecting in. Ironically even though I followed my guild to the game I am actually motivated by the personal achievement.

I am the kind of player that likes to explore every location, complete every quest before moving on to the next zone and maximise trade skills. With each expansion, I spent most of the time solo’ing to the level cap, then exploring group content with my guild or raiding alliance.

With access to the raiding alliance I get to try challenging content which often require a level of skill and co-ordination. Currently I am motivated with the challenges of raiding with the aim to have completed as much as possible before the next content patch.

I know there is a sigma [sic] attached with gamers, but when you consider some people will return from work and just sit passively in front of a TV for 5hours. Similarly you see people sit all night on online chat channels. Given how some spend their time, how can spending your time problem solving and socialising with others with similar interests be so wrong.

Basil was asked to summarize the main ideas that occurred in each essay. Unfortunately, he was somewhat influenced by the question and noted down what people said their initial impetus for playing World of Warcraft was and then why they continue to play. I had to send him off to do it again. Table 1 illustrates our responses.

When I looked at essay 1, there was a question about things being “secondary to killing bosses , and trudging through raids…” Secondary implies that the other things were of lesser importance, but the negative tone implicit with words like “trudging” would seem to bely that, so I didn’t include the raiding. In talking to Basil, I know he had the same problem, because he asked me about it and I told him I would not give him an answer. As a result, he included raiding, whereas I did not.

On the whole, we don’t seem that different. If we had gone through the essays in advance together and agreed on some themes, I suspect the coding would have been similar. What do you think?

The One and Friends at the start of Razorgore encounter in Blackwing Lair in March of 2010

I’m now in week two of my first survey into learning, communities of practice, and World of Warcraft in support of my doctorate. The first part of the survey is collecting some in-game demographic details, such as how long people have played, what their first character was, favourite professions, etc. The meat of the survey, however, is a short answer question about why people play World of Warcraft.

I am still looking for additional responses and the survey is scheduled to close at the end of this weekend (April 18th). If you play World of Warcraft or know other players, I would be grateful if you could encourage them to visit the survey information page and participate. On completion, participants will be given a code to enter a draw for three Blizzard store pets as prizes.

Tweet, ask in guild, ask at university, or poke your workmates to pass the word along. Just remember that it’s only open to those 18 years or older as I’m interested in examining adults and learning and there are restrictions on participation in things by those younger than 18.

Thanks!

• Survey 1: Why Do You Play World of Warcraft

1. 60% of MMORPGs players are in the 20-35 year-old demographic (Nick Yee in Escoriaza 2009).
2. In World of Warcraft specifically, 47% of players in 2005 were 26 years or older. (Yee 2008).
3. About 75% of new students to The Open University are 26 years or older (Jha 2010, p. 20).

When you consider that World of Warcraft had more than 11.5 million active subscribers by the end of 2008 (Blandeburgo 2009), that’s more than 5.4 million people in an age group very interesting for my work in higher education via distance education. In particular, remember that these 5.4 million people are often very compelled (sometimes even addicted) to play. What is it that motivates these people and what real-life tangible learning benefits are derived?

Those are questions that I intend to answer in the WoW Learning project, a study of learning in World of Warcraft. Quietly built earlier this month and located at the memorable WoWLearning.org, it will be a repository for data, posts, and papers about my Ph.D. research into the learning, motivation, and communities of practice formation demonstrated by World of Warcraft players, both in the game and on forums.

As the project will include ethnographic work in World of Warcraft as well as surveys, in the interests of transparency and to help foster credibility, postings are made using my World of Warcraft character name “Elsheindra (Michelle)” instead of my full real name or commonly used Internet nickname of “Eingang.”

References

• 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 30, 2010).
• Escoriaza, J.C.P. (2009) Second Skin. [MPEG 4 Film]. United States: Liberation Ent.
• Jha, J. (2010) ‘Harnessing Technology To Open Up Learning for All: Interview Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor, Open University, UK’, Global: The International Briefing, 2 (March 2010), pp:18-21. Also available from: http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/d118c039 (Accessed March 30, 2010).
• Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed February 21, 2010).

Elsheindra (me)

Hello, my name is Michelle Hoyle. By day, I’m a respectable Open University course author, associate lecturer, and course presentation chair. At night, I assume my secret identity: Elsheindra, night elf guild mistress of The One on a European World of Warcraft (WoW) server. You’re probably thinking that massively multiple online role playing games (MMORPGs), like WoW, are just for kids. In fact, according to research (Lenhart et al, 2008; Yee, 2008), only about 20% of WoW players are between the ages of 12 to 19. That means some 80% of players are solid, upstanding citizens of the world. They could be your tutors. They could be your next door neighbours. They could be that person you see walking down the street or buying beef at the butcher’s. World of Warcraft, as of May 2009, was holding steady at 11.5 million active subscribers (Blandeburgo, 2009; Chuang, 2009). That’s over 60% of the online gaming market. It’s the most successful personal computer game ever to be released.

What is it that compels these people to spend around 20 to 24 hours a week (Hagel and Brown, 2009; Yee, 2005) in a virtual world? Is it the killing? Is it the girls? Is it the beautiful scenery? Is it the fantastic fashions? People’s motivations vary, so I can’t give you a universal motivation, but I can reveal something about why I play. I play for three reasons: because I’m a community builder, because I’m a teacher, and because I love to help people. They’re all a bit related. I have spent my life bringing people together and helping them form cohesive, long-lasting communities. It started back in the 1980s with electronic bulletin boards and continues today with World of Warcraft. That’s why I run a guild and co-lead an alliance of guilds.

A guild in World of Warcraft is a collection of people who share things in common. The game gives them some tools for sharing, like a shared chat area, calendar, and a bank in which to store money or items for common use. They usually share a philosophy. My guild, for example, is a social guild with a philosophy of doing random acts of kindness. An allied guild is composed of people together for friendship or fun. When my guild members aren’t out being kind to the other 4000 people on the server, they have each other to group with on small tasks, called quests, like curing sick deer or ridding an area of nasty rabid bears. A guild is also a pool of people with which to go on longer adventures in groups of five for rewards like armour and gold in mazelike environments where there are obstacles to overcome and difficult, large monsters to kill—so-called dungeons. The alliance of guilds I help lead allows smaller social-minded guilds like mine to be able to participate in even larger, more complex adventures that require 10, 25, or 40 people at a time. It is very rewarding to be in a position to enable people to have fun, but at the same time promote learning of important social interaction and problem solving skills.

Where does the learning come from? The learning is, in fact, everywhere in the game. Those 5-person dungeon groups or the larger 25-person groups require leaders to decide on strategy and direct the other people with varied motivations. Some people go to these dungeons only to get better gear. That’s their motivation. Other people go for the feeling of accomplishment in participating in something difficult. When people are there for gear, there can be clashes over who should get it, which requires good interpersonal relationship skills and diplomacy on the part of the group leader. In our guild alliance, we’ve had leaders good at strategy and telling people what to do but with terrible interpersonal skills. That made their adventures not very fun, so people were reluctant to participate. Likewise, running a successful guild over a long period of time requires all manner of leadership and diplomacy skills. WoW is a safe, low-risk environment in which to learn these things and they can transfer into real-world rewards (Brown and Thomas, 2006).

Elsheindra as a healing tree

In order to contribute to a team effectively, people need to learn to play their characters well. Each character has specific abilities. Elsheindra, my character, is a druid healer. She cures people of diseases and poisons and heal their bodies of damage they have taken while fighting. I’ve specialized in being a healer for over four years. I’ve become really, really good at healing by dint of lots of practice and much analysis of how things work. I have pride in my abilities and I love being able to help people in the game in a non-violent fashion, because I was not much interested in hacking and slashing at things. Other people are extremely interested in effectively killing things and devote hours outside of the game to reading about their character’s role and how to improve on it, often in very tiny increments. I’m very willing to share my knowledge and experience with other people and often other very good players are too.

I’ve told you a lot about what kinds of things I do in World of Warcraft and my initial motivations. What I haven’t told you are the things I’ve gained: love, acceptance, friendship, and a Ph.D. project, in order of importance. I’m currently researching what elements in games like WoW contribute to motivation and whether or not that can be transferred effectively into distance learning (Hoyle, 2009a; 2009b). Both feature activities that are a lot of work and, let’s face it, aren’t fun. In World of Warcraft, though, people persist with these difficult, not-fun tasks. I know I’ve persisted in some things because of the friends I’ve made. Those friendships have even transcended the virtual world, with people helping me move from apartment to apartment multiple times, even though they live in a different city.

Basil, my partner

The alliance of guilds I co-run just had a real-life adventure at Bletchley Park and a BBQ at my house afterwards, one of several such successful large-scale events over the years. It’s also not uncommon for some of my guild mates to just come and visit from other parts of the UK or from other countries. One of my guild mates even came along from Denmark to Canada for the summer. Are we just strange misfits? That’s a common perception of gamers. I don’t fit in lots of places but in WoW there’s a place for me, as there is for them, and it’s not just because “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”. Finally, “Basil”, my real-life partner, is someone I met in WoW because he was helping me co-lead the alliance of guilds. We’ve been together for over two and a half years. We still play WoW together on a regular basis, although not 20 some hours a week. There’s nothing like a romantic date night with your beloved and 23 other friends.

WoW is like a fairy tale: magic, dragons, true love, fashion, elves, and orcs; but it’s also what I’ve made of it: a place to be myself and to do the things I love to do.

References

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 August 4, 2009).

Brown, J.S. & Thomas, D. (2006) ‘You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!’ Wired, 14.04 [Online] Available from: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Chuang, T. (2009) ‘WoW Stuck at 11.5 Million Subscribers; Blizz Focused on StarCraft, Diablo’, OCRegister Blizzard Blog, blog entry posted May 7, 2009. Available from: http://gaming.freedomblogging.com/2009/05/07/wow-stuck-at-115-million-subscribers-blizz-focused-on-starcraft-diablo/2201/ (Accessed August 4, 2009).

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 August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M.A. (2009a) ‘Levelling Lifelong Learning: Annual Progress Review’, E1n1verse, blog entry posted June 7, 2009. Available from: http://einiverse.eingang.org/archives/2009/06/levelling_lifel.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Hoyle, M. (2009b) WoW! Roberts & Susans Game Learning, [online] Slide presentation. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/Eingang/wow-roberts-and-susans-game-learning-a-look-at-world-of-warcraft-higher-education-learning-and-motivation (Accessed August 4, 2009).

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 August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2005) ‘MMORPG Hours vs. TV Hours’, The Daedalus Project, blog entry posted January 11, 2005. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000891.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

Yee, N. (2008) The Daedulus Project, [online]. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/docs/shared-data.php (Accessed August 4, 2009).

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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)