E1n1verse

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

Downloadable Resources:

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

I have my annual Ph.D. review meeting tomorrow afternoon. As usual, I’m more than a bit nervous, especially as I made the big step this academic year of completely dropping my former Ph.D. work and starting a brand new topic that intersects the boundaries of my three main interests: communities, learning and teaching, and Internet-enabled technologies. As part of the review process, we’re asked to produce a 4-page report that explains what we’ve done since the last report. In your first year, this report ought to focus on your thesis proposal, although many students won’t yet have one. I do have some ideas about what I want to do and how I am going to go about it. I’ve made an online version so that it will be indexed and easily findable by others interested in World of Warcraft and e-learning.

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.

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For the first time in years, I’m taking a postgraduate course myself: H812: Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice, which I’m doing both for personal development and to provide theoretical groundwork in educational pedagogy for my Ph.D. work in educational technology.

A recent activity asked us to reflect on influences on our teaching practices, considering: practices arising from personal experiences as a student; practices from our departments; and practices we can attribute to other sources. In addition, we were asked to consider aspects of our workplace that favoured or hindered good practice. I starting making notes on the 14th of October. I did not post them to my group because I felt this was a really important activity. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, it can be difficult to move ahead in a purposeful fashion. I wanted this activity to serve as a good baseline, so I invested a substantial amount of effort into thinking about it and writing it up in a coherent, cohesive fashion.

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