It is Time to Tweak eLearning

I’ve realized that I add questions as titles to my posts very often. Maybe because I am not sure exactly what I am saying is like what everyone else is saying, perhaps because I want this blog to be more of a dialog. A social interaction…

This is what has occurred to me lately: game developers want their gaming experiences to be social ones. More and more you see game website like MiniClip, one of my favorites, creating social networks around their already fun products. 

What does adding social networking features around games offer? Well, first of all, it is my belief and some of my findings that the Net Generation (yes I have been reading a lot about this subject lately) … well, the Net Generation is a generation that enjoys social interaction, doing things in groups. So, adding features that let them network with friends and play with people they know allows them to “share the joy” of playing the game, challenging their friends. Yahoo, for instance, has been offering online multiplayer games for a long time on their games pages (I love the pool game, by the way). The difference here is that many developers are improving the networking capabilities, allowing the players to, for example, have customized avatars, email friends, challenge friends to certain games, share those games on Facebook, embed them on blogs, etc., all from the main website once they log in.

Something intriguing is that  having “amazing” graphics doesn’t really matter that much because players enjoy the games and the social interaction. It is an era in which people value more the social the the actual “lone wolf” immersion of the first generations Playstation games.

The interesting thing is that this idea of social gaming is spreading to game consoles too. The Nintendo Wii is a great example of that. Players can add their friends’ Wiis to their and actual email addresses to their address books and message them from the Wii console itself (no need for a CD or anything, this is built into the Console itself). Users can share their Wii numbers and Miis (Wii avatars) with people they know and play games together. They can also share their Wii information with people they don’t know through an unnofficial website called ShareMiis (this exemplifies how much people want to connect with one another). Players can also play “guessing” the most popular answers to polls on the “Everyone Votes” channel (players can also submit their own ideas for questions to be asked on a regional or world level).

Why am I going on and on about social games? Because this trend has to tell us something about learning also. Knowing how people want to interact should also tell us a lot about how people want to learn. In the end, learning is a game (with scores, motivation, outcomes, rules, and all those items Marc Prensky always mentions as defining a game), the difference is how fun and motivating we want to make that game. 

People want to socialize, they want to interact. That is how learning should be. We (educators, instructional designers) have a lot to learn from the gaming industry… a lot to learn.

UPDATE>>

from TechCrunch:

“Social games are not just multiplayer games. In social games, existing social relationships add context and motivation to the gameplay. Social games are more fun to play with people you know than with anonymous strangers. Examples of social games include Friends for Sale*, where you had better buy your girlfriend back from that guy who has been hitting on her at the gym,(fluff) Friends, where if your BFF feeds your pet, you are compelled to reciprocate, and Power Challenge, where you can’t let your team’s loss to your fraternity brother’s team go unavenged.

Even single player games can become social when the right infrastructure for community and social interaction are built around them, including high score leaderboards, achievement badges, challenges and simple message boards, as Kongregate, Addicting Games, MiniClip andMindJolt are demonstrating.”

So in reply to Ed Teng’s comment in my post with invites to A.Viary online production tools (if I understand him correctly) I will post some links and comments to webconferencing tools that might be useful for instructional purposes.

ePresence -> Free and open source tool. Has to be installed on your local server. Technical support is offered by the Open Source Consortium. Their webconferencing and webcasting applications are excellent and feature-rich. It is possible to record both webcasting (broadcasting an event, for instance) and make it available on your website. It is possible to record webconferencing (people interacting with a virtual whiteboard in a virtual room) and make it available as well.

DimDim -> Another open source initiative. You can host online meeting without installing any extra program, just go to their website, create a free account and you are up and running. DimDim allows you to schedule and invite anyone without requiring them to install any plugins. Maximum of 20 users in the free ad-supported version of the online web meeting program, but they offer room for up to 100 people for $495/year and an enterprise edition. You can also install locally and free of charge the DimDim Enterprise edition free of charge (it requires more technical know-how).

Elluminate -> Webconferencing tool with many features. Even though the “looks” are more old-fashioned, this program is very stable and well-accepted in the academic arena. They have good academic packages.

Yugma -> Feature-rich webconferencing tool that has a free version. Yugma offers other versions of their packages that allow you to invite more participants at a time. A plugin is required for participant to view the meeting room. An interesting differentiator for Yugma is that they offer a Skype plugin that works seamless with the famous VOIP client.

Vyew -> Web-based tool that has many important features in their free version. No plugins to download and plans that offer more flexibility and storage are also offered.