eLearning Roadtrip

When Learning Analytics Meet Gamification

Great minds are already at work on a very big idea: What if we morph the emerging fascination with massive N predictive learning analytics with a mechanism for collecting massive transactional behavioral data where millions and millions of subjects already willingly volunteer their input?

Learning Analytics, meet Gamification.

I don't like the term gamificiation, either. But I'm not talking about the introduction of check-ins and badges to everything. THAT is something I would much prefer to call ... playing with games. Rather, I am talking about the benefits of considering the rich massive N data source for tracking the behavioral transactions of game play. And being able to subject that big pool of data to a battery of descriptive, inferential and predictive statistical methods to identify points of loss and momentum. 

Anne Derryberry, a 2010-2011 Fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri School of Journalism, has been applying what she calls purpose-driven game design to journalism and journalism education. She has focused on games as an emerging medium and distribution channel for news-telling, particularly as a means to induce community engagement and civic participation.

Her research is also indicating ways to track and analyze behavioral transactions and player interactions of an online game to enable new ways to understand points of loss and momentum in communications- related endeavors. She's coined the term "journalytics" to describe how analytics and purpose-driven game design mesh to give journalism and news outlets the metrics they need to focus and adjust their interaction strategies.

Relevant for journalism. AND education. IMHO. Early and preliminary results. But still. We in the learning world can benefit from some of these ideas.

Anne will be quick to point out that America's Army and other MMOGs have been using game play for recruitment, community building and even into predictive performance advising and professional development guidance for a while now. She has been tracking serious games for learning, training and performance support for the past few years at her blog, I'm Serious.net. But she was fascinated at seeing if the things she saw in these game-based learning designs could be relevant in other disciplines. This past year she developed noozYou as a vehicle for testing some of her hypotheses about purpose-driven game design in journalism with Mizzou journalism students. 

She can tell you about this far, far better than I can. So I am going to suggest that you follow her on Twitter at @aderryberry and @noozYou. It's been fascinating stuff.

I WILL tell you she's been advising the Sage Road crew as we've been pushing our own predictive analytics horizons. We think this approach holds great promise and has immediate, direct positive implications for the new kinds of data collection opportunities.

I continue to believe the most immediate opportunity for demonstrating the value of learning analytics in institutions and enterprises is to mine existing pools of data in creative and thoughtful ways. But Stephen Downes was absolutely right in his April 24th critique of my post Data Change Everything. He said that some of the emerging learning analytics paradigms will benefit not from mining old data new ways, but in looking for better ways to collect new information. Here is one very exciting new possibility for doing just exactly that.

 

My World Series Bet with Darcy Hardy (Go Giants!)

The World Series gets started in San Francisco this evening. As a Bay area resident, I am showing my Giants pride by wearing my black and orange Buster Posey jersey today. 

Turns out that the Giants are playing against the Texas Rangers. I have many dear friends who live in Texas. Dear Friends. I am so sorry. For the next several days, we are on opposite sides of the river. 

Bring it. Giants.

My very dear friend, Dr. Darcy Harcy, University of Texas San Antonio (and about-to-be announced appointee to a very important position in an unnamed city on the East Coast) happens to be a Rangers fan. I suppose it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. So you know there has to be a bet.

I expect that she and Dr. Rob Robinson, also of UTSA, and I will exchange a toast with an adult beverage when we see each other at the upcoming WCET Annual Meeting in LaJolla in a couple of weeks. And so it would be easy to make the bet that the loser needs to buy a round of adult beverages.

Call me a sap - I want to turn this into something a little more meaningful than a mojito or a Mexican martini. Not that there's anything wrong with either one of them, of course.

How a challenge for the benefit of the winner's favorite educational technology cooperative?

The winner gets to choose, either to star in OR have the loser star in, a webcast on a topic of the winner's choice that will help further the mission of said favorite higher educational technology cooperative. Loser must promote said webcast using the word "hieroglyphics", and must appear in said webcast (via photo, slide webcam or video) wearing hat / headgear of the winner's choice. 

Perhaps there should be a preview of said webcast while we are in LaJolla?

Go, Giants.

 

 

Skating to where the puck is going

I have been thinking a lot about Kendall Whitehouse's March 18th interview with Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft, in the recent issue of Knowledge@Wharton . Having connections to both men help make the interview particularly enjoyable; I had the pleasure of getting to know Kendall and his team from the Wharton School when they were the rock-star, go-to team for telling the Macromedia Flash platform story in education and I have continued to be an avid reader of their Knowledge@Wharton e-zine since those days. Stephen was our EVP of the worldwide field organization at Macromedia when I started working in solutions marketing, and my boss, Penny Wilson, was a direct report of Stephen's, so I have my "close to greatness" connections here as well. I have positive memories of Stephen's leadership at both MACR and ADBE, so it was great to catch up on what he is doing up in Redmond.

In the interview, Stephen shares a great point with Kendall, about how in tough economic times it is incumbent upon smart companies to think about where they want to be when things improve and to make investments in those areas to build future capacity. I do remember his talking on this topic in a number of education customer meetings - when there's no market for your goods, don't spend your money where it won't matter. Instead, invest in where you want to be when the markets turn around. This was regarding the Macromedia decisions to focus on Flash research. One direction, looking at RIAs Flex and AIR, is now the daily bread of many a developer. The other direction, Flash on mobile, is now coming into its own as an issue for North American businesses to attend to, finally.

Stephen's point is reminiscent of the advice that was supposedly given to Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretsky by his father when teaching his son how to play the game. Walter's advice included to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been."

Two parallel thoughts. One relates to the ongoing discussion I've been having with industry friends over the past several weeks about how now is the time for forward thinking individuals and enterprises to consider how to take advantage of the great economic and market changes that are going on around us. The other relates to my recent diatribes on the topic of rethinking professional preparation for instructional designers so that this profession has a shot at ongoing relevancy.

I think it would be enlightened self-interest to demonstrate the value of crawling beyond the online course management swamp, sharpen our learning, programming and production skills and reach out into the metasphere, the game zone, the mobile web and the cloud. We owe it to ourselves to learn how to flex business muscles. Big questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis, like "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it to them for me to solve it?" An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.