Web 2.0 Potholes - Gamification

Reading the Web2.0 Potholes Direction pages made me reflect back to my previous role as a Local Authority School Consultant.  One of the projects I was involved in was working with a team of colleagues from across the service and outside organizations to create a MUVE (multi user virtual environment) called Barnsborough.  This was designed to act as a stimulus for raising boys' writing attainment.  The project was aimed at engaging children, especially boys, in learning to write using a fun, engaging games based environment.

Overall the project was a success although there were many barriers which we had to overcome initially such as major technical problems getting the browser to work across the tightly locked down schools networks, teacher's concerns about the resource and lack of confidence using the environment.

The children absolutely loved it and wanted to use it all of the time.  So much so that they tried to access it at home.  Some claimed to have found it on the internet which lead to widespread panic about e safety issues as the children could potentially be chatting to anyone of the internet unsupervised.  The children could not access the environment at home as they needed to install a browser which was only available to schools.  However they could access the Active World browser and access other MUVE online.  We also had incidents of inappropriate text chatting taking place in the world and so we set up a 'bot' to record all of the chat as a monitoring system.

It was interesting work with Professor Guy Merchant from Sheffield Hallam University on the project as he was very interesting in the way that children used the MUVE to communicate.  He commented to me that it was shame that the system had to be so locked into attainment and that it was not apply to be used in a much more creative and improvised way.  He published an interesting paper called Literacy in virtual worlds on the project in which he discussed many of the issues such as esafety and how the traditional lesson was transformed as well as highlighting the need for a considerable amount of time teachers needed to become confident with the environment rather than feeling exposed by their lack of knowledge (Merchant 2009).

References

Merchant, G 2009, 'Literacy in virtual worlds', Journal Of Research In Reading, 32, 1, pp. 38-56