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.

Last month, amidst the busyness and stresses of my life, an important event passed by without fanfare or notice: I published my first open access article in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, a recently relaunched journal co-edited by Martin Weller.

It’s “only” a book review of Kurt Squire’s Video Games and Learning: Teaching Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, but it has a few firsts of its own. It’s the first thing I’ve “formally” published on video games, learning, and community. It’s also the first item published in a traditional academic forum since book reviews and conference papers in 1997/1998. That is a big dry spell, I agree! I’m working on making 2012 the year I turn things around. From small beginnings can come big things, so here’s to more firsts!

Hoyle, M.A. (2012). ‘Book Review: From N00B to Community Organizer: A Review of Kurt Squire’s ‘Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory in the Digital Age’’. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, JIME Special Issue on Open Educational Resources [online]. Available from: http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2012-06 [Accessed April 15, 2012].

Image: Marbles, many marbles. I think I have lost mine in a sample of many marbles.

I’ve been re-running analyses today on my population of survey responses. I decided to remove some more responses to eliminate some the scatteredness in the population. The majority of responses were from European PvE (player versus the environment) realm players, so I removed the four American realm players and then the five non-PvE players, leaving me with a sample of 30.

The more I read about sampling, the more confused I am.

When we read the Oliver and Carr (2009) WoW communities of practice and learning paper the other day, we were somewhat dismissive because it only had five couples. However, the paper also mentioned that it used “theoretical sampling”, which we had not heard of. Someone looked it up quickly on Wikipedia and it sounded like you chose your sample based on it generating the features you wanted to look at. Now the description in the Oliver and Carr paper sounds more like “purposive sampling”, because they described their sampling in a way that seemed to fit with Cohen et al’s description of “…qualitative researchers handpick the cases to be included in the sample on the basis of their judgement of their typicality or possession of the particular characteristics being sought” (2007, p. 114-115):

Players were recruited through online guilds and real-world social networks. The first two sets of participants were sampled for convenience (two heterosexual couples); the rest were invited to participate in order to broaden this sample (one couple was chosen because they shared a single account, one where a partner had chosen to stop playing and one mother–son pairing).
Oliver and Carr (2009, p. 446).

I was browsing through Research Methods in Education today and it specifically mentions theoretical sampling as a feature of grounded theory and the sample size is immaterial. The important part is that you have enough data to saturate the categories in your theory. You collect more and more data until the acquisition of more data does not advance or modify the theory developed. It suggests that the size of the data set may be fixed by the number of people to whom one has access but you have to consider that it may be necessary to seek further data (Cohen et al. 2007, 116-117). A sample of five couples would then possibly be acceptable. Although I am taking a grounded theory approach, this does not feel quite like what I am doing, although I do have the intention of generating the theory from the data I have and then pursuing a larger-scale study later.

Another possibility is volunteer sampling. This is apparently different than convenience sampling. I suppose in a convenience sample, you have more control over how many people respond, e.g. a class of students, and you are directly asking them. In volunteer sampling, you rely on volunteers, like personal friends or friends of friends, although it can also be via, for example, a newspaper advertisement (Cohen et al. 2007, p. 116). This sounds similar to the approach that I took. I already knew I had to be careful about making generalizations and certainly the representativeness of the sample is lacking. This is probably acceptable, provided the lack of typicality is made clear.

Real World Research describes a convenience sample as one of the most widely used (Robson 2002, p. 265). Sensible uses of convenience samples, Robson suggests, are for piloting a proper sample survey or getting a feeling for the issues involved. This too feels like what I was doing, since I designed the study originally to be the starting point for a future, larger study. Providing a springboard for future research is also described as being acceptable by Bryman (2008, p.183) in Social Research Methods.

My section describing the survey distribution currently reads as follows:

A blog site was created for the overall project and readers invited to participate (Hoyle 2010) through an initial posting. Readers were given a brief explanation of the survey’s purpose, contact details for the author, and an explanation of the rules and time and effort expected. The page explained that there would be an opportunity to enter an optional draw to win a virtual in-game pet as a reward. This page also contained a link to the survey, hosted on SurveyMonkey, a third-party commercial web survey site.

At a minimum, 25 to 30 participants fully completing the survey were required and more than 50 to 75 would be burdensome. Advertising was therefore not  ambitious or comprehensive. Short messages were broadcast periodically on a European (player versus environment) game realm to a text communication channel shared by members of five allied guilds. A month before the survey, allied guild leaders were questioned about their current membership numbers. This information is available in the game and reflects the number of individual accounts that belong to a given guild. Total number of player accounts was 437. That count includes inactive players and players belonging to more than one allied guild. It is also possible for players to have more than one account, if they are willing to pay for it, resulting in the same person being counted more than once. However, after discussion with the guild leaders, the number of people with multiple accounts or multi-guild membership was believed to be small; the number of people reported is therefore probably fairly close. However, it is difficult to estimate what proportion would be active players or would have seen the periodic messages.

In addition to the in-game messages, the study was also advertised numerous times via the author’s main Twitter account and an account dedicated to news for the allied guilds. This resulted in a number of rebroadcasts as other researchers and followers tried to assist by passing along the message. Twitter messages, by their nature limited to 140 characters, were very brief, basically a tease along with the survey blog posting URL containing more information and the actual survey link. Finally, there was some promotion and requests for participation on guild forums belonging to the allied guild members, but not on the official Blizzard World of Warcraft forums, Elitist Jerks, Joystiq, or other large WoW community forums. Most participants would therefore be recruited from a community of people who knew of the author. This was intentional to benefit from social capital gained already by being a guild leader and co-leader of the allied guild group, especially as participants were expected to engage in a non-trivial task.

The study was designed as the first of a series investigating factors contributing to players persisting in learning and working in massively multiple online games, like World of Warcraft. Solicitation for participation was deliberately low-key to make the analysis of discursive responses manageable. Themes derived from the discursive responses could then be used to design a larger scale survey in the future. In this study, I particularly wanted to start collecting data on the following six research questions from a combination of qualitative and quantitative questions:

1. What motivates people to play World of Warcraft?
2. What motivates people to persist in playing?
3. Is there a relationship between gender and stated motivations?
4. Is there a relationship between age and stated motivations?
5. Is there a relationship between nationality and stated motivations?
6. Is there a relationship between character roles and classes and motivation?

In keeping with the overarching theme of learning, I hoped to see some evidence of learning behaviour or practices, prompting the most important research question:

7. What, if anything, are people learning in World of Warcraft?

The question therefore remains: convenience sample, volunteer sample, theoretical sample, or a mixture? I originally thought it was a convenience sample, but now I do not feel confident in that at all. Oliver and Carr describe two of the couples in their theoretical sample as being convenience samples. Are mixtures “acceptable”? I am leaning now strongly towards labelling it a volunteer sample. What have I done? Help!

Sincerely,
Confused in London

References

Bryman, A. (2008) Social Research Methods. 3rd edition. Oxford, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press.

Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2007) ‘Chapter 4: Sampling’, in Research Methods in Education, 6th edition. Milton Park, United Kingdom, Routledge UK.

Hoyle, M.A. (2010) WoW Learning: A Study of Learning in World of Warcraft by Michelle A. Hoyle, [online]. (Accessed June 24, 2010).

Oliver, M. & Carr, D. (2009) ‘Learning in Virtual Worlds: Using Communities of Practice to Explain How People Learn From Play’, British Journal of Educational Technology, 40 (3), pp:444-457. Also available from: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00948.x (Accessed June 14, 2011).

Robson, C. (2002) Real World Research: A Resource for Social Scientists and Practitioners-Researchers. 2nd edition. Oxford, United Kingdom, Blackwell Publishing.

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).

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.

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)

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.