This shit is old

[blockby]

Livestream from Khulna, Bangladesh

This week UN-Habitat and a group of young people are using Minecraft to redesign Solar Park in Khulna, the third largest city in Bangladesh. From 9am-5pm Bangladeshi time on Friday 13 March you can follow the workshop live from Bangladesh here.

If the video doesn’t show, you can view it here.

[doctorcaw]

Great post on why applications of gamification can fail. This is VERY applicable to both classroom and LMS-based attempts to "gamify" education.

[doctorcaw]

Off Book: Video Games (from PBS Arts)

[doctorcaw]

Shocking statistics on retention for two-year college students published by ACT

27%.  That's how many students on average will complete an associate's degree within three years in public two-year colleges across America.  The statistics are even more dismal for completion within the standard two-year time frame: 13%!

How do we, as educators, respond to this information?  What can we do to not only keep students in our classrooms but also to help insure that they earn their degree?

(Information gathered from the 2011 report on National Collegiate Retention and Persistence to Degree Rates, published by ACT)

[doctorcaw]

Playing games produces a sense of whole-hearted engagement.

Jane McGonigal - "On Productivity"

[doctorcaw]

Does every game have goals? Most do, very obviously; most games have an explicit win-state, a set of victory conditions (to use a term from board wargaming). The basic transaction we make with games is to agree to behave as if achieving victory is important, to let the objective guide our behavior in the game. There’s little point, after all, in playing a game without making that basic commitment. But some games do not have explicit goals.

Greg Costikyan - "I Have No Words and I Must Design"

[doctorcaw]

First of all, teaching is hard. Second, game design is hard. Finally, being good at both of these things is incredibly difficult for most educators. But the value of games for the development of pedagogy need not rely on the design and development of games that teach. This is because while teachers are most likely not going to be game designers, they are curriculum and course designers.

Kimon Keramidas - "What Games Have to Teach Us about Teaching and Learning" 

[doctorcaw]

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Ian Bogost - "Gamification Is Bullshit"

[doctorcaw]

Jane McGonigal - "Gaming Can Make a Better World"