Credit: Screenshot by Michelle A. Hoyle
Image: Dominion on the iPad

Credit: Photo by Newtown graffiti under a
CC BY 2.0 License
Image: It makes me so angry!

A few Christmases back, a good friend “helpfully” gifted us with the original Dominion game. I say “helpfully” because Dominion is deck building game, although not in the sense of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering. Dominion’s base set includes treasure cards, action cards, and victory cards. You purchase these cards primarily with the treasure coin cards, trying to acquire more victory cards than your opponent. Action cards can act on other players, give you additional spending power, give you more cards, or increase your maximum number of permissible purchases.

With randomness in its favour, Dominion is enjoyable to play repeatedly and quick once you’re familiar with the various action cards. It even plays well with only two players. Numerous expansions are available with different action card themes you can mix and match. We have them all, much to our bank account’s detriment. Thank you, “friend”. (-:

There have been some extremely excellent board game adaptations for Apple’s iPhones and iPads, including Dominion publisher Rio Grande Games’ Carcassonne tile-building game and Days of Wonder’s Small World. Although some of these aren’t too bad for setup time, it’s nice to not need a big table and to start playing immediately. It’s also nice to play whenever you have the urge. I was therefore quite keen to see a Dominion application and finally there was one: Dominion by Donald X. Vaccarino. Hurrah!

Vaccarino’s version is unofficial but released with Rio Grande’s (RGG) approval. They apparently, according to a Board Game Geek posting from an RGG employee , permit this for casual/free versions with the proviso those games be removed when an official version is released. Very nice! As a result, Vaccarino’s version is able to use the name and card artwork. It’s not as polished as Carcassonne for the iPad in terms of user experience but it’s generally OK with some niggly annoyances here and there, like it’s prone to crashing between games.

In addition to a tutorial mode and offline mode to play against your choice of a number of AI opponents, it also features a two-player real-time networked playing mode. You can either invite someone specific to play with you or use the somewhat clunky Game Center-powered matching service to find someone else wanting to play. Once matched, the experience is fairly intuitive. You drag cards you to play onto the “table” and drag cards from the tableaux to buy them. It’s not too dissimilar to playing with real cards, although much quicker, making it somewhat harder to see what’s happened sometimes.

Although the website allows you to retrieve some play history on a given player by name, this isn’t built into the game. Basically, it’s just a listing on matches completed and the final score. Indeed, there aren’t even in-game leaderboards, despite the use of Game Center. This lack of history leads to some very unsporting player behaviour. My play history reveals I’ve lost more games than I’ve won. What it doesn’t show is how many games I’ve started but not finished because I used the “quit game” option to terminate the current match. I’ve lost more games than I’ve won because it’s annoyingly common for players you’re trouncing to quit rather than lose. To be fair, the reverse also happens, where someone beating you decides there’s insufficient challenge and quits, but that feels a lot rarer.

If you’re a player who quits mid-game, I have two words for you: please don’t. Just because I’m not sitting across a real table from you doesn’t make it any less rude or disrespectful to just up and quit because you’re losing. Or are you the kind of person who would kick over the table and take your toy soldiers home too? If you are that person, please don’t ruin my gaming pleasure and waste my time with your snivelly, immature behaviour. Go play in the sewer with the other rats–even if you are winning. That is all.

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: Should I be the person hiding my head in the sand?

First step is to install NoteScraper for Evernote. Once that’s done, I use the following steps:

1. Log into your Kindle account at http://kindle.amazon.com/ using Safari.
2. Click on the link to your books (https://kindle.amazon.com/your_reading).
3. Locate the book with notes you want to export in that list and click the title of it.
4. Scroll down to where notes start and choose “show your highlights only” (this also shows your notes).
5. Assuming NoteScraper for Evernote is correctly installed and the Apple global Script Menu is visible on the top menu bar, choose “Export Kindle notes to Evernote”.
6. You’ll be asked for some tags, a notebook to add it to (Kindle Notes), and whether you want each note to have its own note.
7. Done. It’s in Evernote now.

It can then be copied and pasted into DevonThink (the tool I use) or other electronic journal or writing tools you may use.

Don’t use a Mac? You can perform the first four steps and then manually copy the content from the web page to wherever you like, but formatting and appearance won’t likely be as nice.

I’ve quickly posted this based on my how-to in my own research journal in response to a Twitter question by Catulla. I’ll add some illustrative screenshots later.

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Image: Photograph composited from pieces of many other photographs: a visual affinity.

James Paul Gee introduced the idea of affinity groups in his seminal What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language, Learning, and Literacy (Gee, 2007). It is defined as the people associated with a given semiotic domain. That basically is a domain in which people use particular symbols or language to communicate and interact. We’re already well used to the concept, even if we don’t realize it. A given academic discipline, for example, will have its own vocabulary and, in that context, use language in a particular way, even if others use it differently in another context. It’s all about situated cognition and situated meaning. Games and their communities will have their own semiotics and constitute a semiotic domain. Members of an affinity group will have a way to recognize others who belong and to assess what counts as acceptable or recognizable within that semiotic domain.

The key problem he perceives is that we attempt to a label a group of people and then have issues about who is “in” or “out” of the group. This comes about in particular because:

• Community implies belonging, which may not always be the case, especially in classrooms and workspaces.
• Community brings the idea of people being members, related to belonging, but also to shared goals or a collective purpose that may not be in force.
• Community of practice has been applied to all manner of things, possibly “missing the trees for the forest.”

Starting the notion of spaces, rather than community, he argues, can give us an analytical lens with which to examine classrooms and the activities that occur within them without the baggage that community of practice brings with it. “In affinity spaces people ‘bond’ first and foremost to an endeavour or interest and secondarily, if at all, to each other.” (Gee, 2007 p.98)

Spaces (general) have the following features:

• Content, both design content and interactional content, i.e. how people play and how they organize their behaviours, beliefs, values and actions around the content. Design content is created by content generators.
• Organization of content and interactions. Content organization arises from the design of a game. Interactional organization comes from interactions on and with the space and the people in it.
• Portals, which are entrances into the space, e.g. a website to discuss a game, the game disc itself, wikis, etc. Some of these become content generators in their own right.

I believe guilds in World of Warcraft are examples of a community of practice in many cases, because they do exhibit shared goals, joint enterprise, and mutual engagement. Not all guilds will be possibly, but those are probably also the guilds that don’t manage to live that long. Ducheneaut et al (2007) found that in a 6-month period, out of 3000+ guilds, 54% had disappeared. One question Dave White (2007) posed in his GLS 3 talk was how long does it take to form or seed a community? That is a good question. One of the problems with adapting the community practices in WoW to higher education (online or otherwise) is that guilds do take some time to evolve, especially if they involve people who were previously unknown to each other. This is perhaps where Gee’s idea of affinity spaces comes into play. Affinity spaces, Gee says, have the following eleven characteristics:

• Common endeavour, not race, class, gender, or disability, is primary.
• Newbies and masters and everyone else share common space.
• Some portals are strong generators.
• Content organization is transformed by interactional organization.
• Encourages intensive and extensive knowledge.
• Encourages individual and distributed knowledge.
• Encourages dispersed knowledge.
• Uses and honours tacit knowledge.
• Many different forms and routes to participation.
• Lots of different routes to status.
• Leadership is porous and leaders are resources.

Reproduced from (Gee, 2007 p. 98-101).

A space can be more or less of an affinity space and can possess degrees of the characteristics. It is not a binary, prescriptive list. The theory then is that if we incorporate these ideas into our educational environments, we can help forge more cohesiveness, autonomy, and, in the end learning. Many of these characteristics are also shared by communities of practice and foster digital literacies. Those are the characteristics of dispersed and distributed knowledge, which may be generated by the students themselves, who become portals in their own right. Autonomy is forged by individual knowledge and content organization being transformed by interactional organization—which bears a striking resemblance to Downes and Siemens’s ideas about connectivism (c.f. Downes, 2007; Siemens, 2008). The last two can also be artefacts of digital literacies or encouraged by a connectivist paradigm: the tools used allow many types of participation. Some people may participate in wikis or make videos, while others may only post on forums. Others may take on roles within the game. My partner “Basil”, for example, in Eve Online does not have a lot of time to play with his guild because of a time zone difference. He is, however, extremely active in their forums and became a valued member because of that. He is participating in the Eve affinity space but also belongs to a community of practice within Eve.

References:

Downes, S. (2007) ‘What Connectivism Is’, Half an Hour, blog entry posted February 3, 2007. Available from: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html (Accessed July 25, 2011).

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.

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

Gee, J.P. (2007b) ‘Affinity Spaces: From Age of Mythology to Today’s Schools’, in Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy, New York, NY, United States, Peter Lang. pp. 87-103.

Siemens, G. (2008) ‘What is the Unique Idea in Connectivism?’, Connectivism, blog entry posted August 6, 2008. Available from: http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=116 (Accessed July 25, 2011).

White, D. (2007) ‘Cultural Capital and Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying’, presented at Games Learning and Society 3.0, Madison, WI, United States, July 12-13. Also available from: http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2007/07/30/cultural-capital-and-community-development-in-the-pursuit-of-dragon-slaying/ (Accessed July 26, 2011).

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.

We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service. This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services. You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

Photo Credit: Photo by Alexandra Bellink (Alex Bellink) under an Attribution Generic license.

People initially were upset because they misread the terms (possibly in an earlier incarnation than what I have here) to say that Dropbox owned anything you uploaded and could do anything they wanted with it. That part has been addressed by Dropbox, I think.

However, I know I’m confused about whether or not it’s OK to use Dropbox to, for example, synchronize journal articles between my computer and my iPad. I have the right to view and store the journal articles, but I certainly don’t have the right to grant them some of the bits they’re asking for.  I think it’s related to the bit “…to the extent necessary for the Service”, meaning whatever I have asked them to do. Surely just storing and sending the files to me doesn’t violate the terms or copyright, does it? Some fellow researchers on Twitter thought that it did. At least one of them immediately dropped Dropbox.

I believe the intent isn’t to prevent you from privately sharing things with yourself but would reasonably expect you not to be posting materials you don’t have rights to in a way that other people can access them, e.g. public shares, web pages, etc.  I’m not a lawyer though. What do the terms actually say? If you are privately sharing copyrighted material with yourself, are you in violation of the terms? Will you go blind or will the wrath of Dropbox or the publishers fall upon you? What do you think?

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).

Credit: Photo by Thomas Hawk under an Attribution NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license
Image: People interacting together.

The other day Howard Rheingold asked me a question that made me stop and think:

@eingang Would you say Open University UK is the grandmother of today’s emerging p2p learning communities?
April 11, 2011 @17:20, Howard Rheingold.

The Open University (OU) started off in distance education, providing accredited university level courses in the United Kingdom starting in 1971¹. I didn’t join the OU until 2000 when they launched their first online course: T171, You, Your Computer, and The Net. Unlike earlier OU courses, this course required substantial online interaction between students and tutors. Even the assignments were submitted electronically. The whole course, however, was not completely online. It was more of a blended learning approach, as it featured high production quality printed booklets of the study materials, commercial books, and some face-to-face tutorials across the 9-month course, in addition to the forums and course website.

One thing it did attempt to do, and that is evident still in the design of many of today’s OU courses, is encourage students to form a peer learning community. At the time, it did this through FirstClass forums, not just by providing the previously isolated distance education students with forums they could use for communication, but by setting assignments that required students to engage in dialogue with one another. This is a beautiful example of Brown & Adler’s social view of learning (2008), where understanding is socially constructed by members of the group interacting with one another, to share and build upon their existing knowledge. Vygotsky and Dewey would have approved, as this fits in with a constructivist approach to learning, something that is also often very evident in OU courses.

Is a peer learning community the same as a peer-to-peer learning community? I am not so sure about that. However, an example of such a community that occurs to me is Livemocha, a language learning website. Livemocha capitalizes on social knowing by bringing together potential teachers (native speakers) with interested learners to facilitate learning practical, conversational language skills (Livemocha 2011). This also leverages social capital, an important component in maintaining social networks. I would say Livemocha is both a peer-to-peer learning community and a peer learning community, because it specifically seeks to make relationships between people as well as providing an overall, larger community sphere where legitimate peripheral participation (c.f. Lave & Wenger 1991) can occur.

Is the OU a peer-to-peer learning community? I think their “traditional” courses—whether online or offline—probably are not. While we are attempting to form communities, we’re not trying specifically to make them peer-to-peer, although that can occur as a result of people being brought together in a community around a course or a tutor group. To be honest, even after doing this bit of thinking, I’m not sure, so I thought I’d ask for input from other members of the OU community. What do you think? Is the OU the grandmother of peer-to-peer learning communities?

1: Although the OU was established in 1969, the first students weren’t enrolled until 1971 (The Open University n.d.).

References:

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 April 18, 2011).

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York, NY, United States, Cambridge University Press.

Livemocha (2011). Livemocha Language Learning Method, [online]. Available from: http://www.livemocha.com/language-learning-method (Accessed April 18, 2011).

The Open University (n.d.). History of the OU, [online]. Available from: http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/main/the-ou-explained/history-the-ou (Accessed April 18, 2011).

If you’re interested in any combination of women and gaming, including some games-based learning, then look no further than the latest issue of The International Journal of Gender, Science and Technlology. It features a special issue on women and games, with articles and reviews. From the special issue’s introduction:

In 2004 video games industry veteran Mark Eyles, then working at the University of Portsmouth, recognised the need for an initiative that would increase the representation of women within the gaming industry. The project Mark instigated – Women in Games (WiG) – began with a series of conferences involving an innovative mixture of people from academia and from industry. The aim of these conferences was to generate and promote initiatives and research that focused on narrowing the gap between men and women working in the games industry.

WiG is now an internationally recognised organisation, still with this mixture of people from academia and from industry. In addition to the annual conferences, WiG members are now also involved in smaller events, online discussions and journals. Now, seven years on, WiG continues to grow and develop and we, in our role as members of the Steering Committee, would like to introduce readers to the special issue section of the GST journal.

The articles included in this special issue reflect the multiple and overlapping aims of the Women in Games initiative. Each of these aims requires the interweaving of academic enquiry with industry engagement and dialogue, which has been an extraordinary strength of the WiG initiative.

by Marian Carr and Helen Kennedy

This is an open journal, so all the articles can be freely downloaded from the contents page for Vol 3 (1).  Articles include:

• Editorial: Special Issue Section
  Marian Carr, Helen Kennedy

• The Sims as a Catalyst for Girls’ IT learning
  Elisabeth Hayes

• Disrupting the Gender Order: Leveling Up and Claiming Space in an After-School Video Game Club
  Jennifer Jenson, Stephanie Fisher, Suzanne de Castell

• Constituting the Player: Feminist Technoscience, Gender, and Digital Play
  Alison Harvey

• Designing Gendered Toys
  Els Rommes, Maartje Bos, Josine Oude Geerdink

• Segregation in a Male-Dominated Industry: Women Working in the Computer Games Industry
  Julie Prescott, Jan Bogg

• Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming
  Nicholas T Taylor

• CASE STUDY: Advancing Elementary-School Girls’ Programming through Game Design
  Ahmet Baytak, Susan M Land

• PERSPECTIVES ARTICLE: A Woman in Games: A Personal Perspective, 1993 – 2010
  Kim Blake

• A Review of ‘A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players’. Author: Jesper Juul
  Kaye Elling

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