“Teaching with Online Games” Webinar with Dr. David Gibson

I’d never taken part in a truly global webinar. Most of the ones I attend are local…or only have the occasional person tapping in from a few other locales. Then, I attended Dr. Gibson’s “Teaching with Online Games,” and as a warm-up to the actual presentation, the facilitator asked participants to indicate their locations on a virtual map. She turned on that annotation tool in Elluminate, and the hundreds of participants dotted many interesting locations in the US, Europe, Australia, Canada, and parts of Asia.

The start was quite auspicious already, with the lead presenter hanging out with the audience and answering their questions. He shared various online resources he had for “.edu game sites”.

These webinars are fine for an overall sense of the topic, but I end up cherry-picking some points of interest.

The Activity Theory Framework and Online Gaming

One of the interesting approaches was that he used the Activity Theory Framework (Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamäki, 1998, Perspectives on Activity Theory), which uses a dynamic approach to understanding the interactions between the learners, a knowledge base, the learning community and assessment. Using this theory as a backdrop with an overlay of a game environment (with players, interface models, rules, gamers / agents, and “control-win”), it’s helpful to see how the various play and simulation elements contribute to the learning.

Some screens later, he showed an “Interpersonal Circumplex,” which shows how teachers and students interact “by negotiating power and affiliation”. There is a circle of continua such as dominant to submissive, mistrusting to trusting, inhibited to exhibitionistic, sociable to aloof, competitive to deferent, and others. That model (apparently uncited) may depict the changing relationships between individuals based on their interactions and variable personalities.

Gibson cited Robert Mislevy’s model of simulation-based assessment to show the design approach to assessing what students know in a continuous fashion during gameplay. Here, the task has an embedded set of characteristics that force a student to use a knowledge set. Gibson noted that complex performances can be supported and documented in such a scenario. He noted that essays may capture knowledge complexity, but that does so in one media. Games may capture knowledge complexity via multi-media forms. New players may begin with an “absence of pathways” in solving problems in the game world, but they may gain experience and develop expertise over time.

As an example of an immersive endeavor that brings in high schoolers to face global challenges like climate change and energy consumption, Gibson cited the Global Grand Challenge (www.globalchallengeaward.org). Here, learners use self-directed learning using simulation-based games. He encouraged webinar participants to send young learners from around the world to the site to sign up and participate in collaborative problem solving. This project involves a virtual earth experience with real physics modeling.

A Postscript: Images with Unreadable Text

Some of the screenshots I took during the presentation showed slides with truly unreadable text. When I magnify the slides, they pixellate into nothingness. Of course, such imagery is offered to give a gist of a concept, and gists are helpful in various situations—to protect the original information, to raise interest, and to offer viewers a flavor of the work.

One such image showed the qualitative and quantitative aspects of an operational sim engine, with the game part (challenge, contest and fun) overlaid over the top.

This presentation was part of the free IGI-Global “Faculty-Led Online Seminars” series. Dr. David Gibson is from the University of Vermont.