The Game Learner

Clark Aldrich is one of the best writers around on the use of simulations/games in education – I picked up two of his books over the break and am looking forward to diving into them soon.

He keeps a great blog which is organised into useful, practical sections focussing on different areas of simulation design and development.

His most recent post is particularly relevant to some work I’m doing at the moment with the Nursing folk here – it’s a list of 15 questions for subject matter experts.

These are the first three:

1. What situation that you experienced epitomized the subject matter? (This could be a real time meeting, or an event that took place over weeks, months, or years.) Were there multiple situations?
2. What were your available options? At each moment, what could you have done in that situation, and what might a naive or inexperienced person done? What did you end up doing?
3. Why would the naive approach fail? What would it not have taken into account?

Blogging can be a very useful tool in the classroom for getting learners to express themselves, share ideas, offer each other feedback and reflect on their experiences.

Subjects where learners keep a work-journal of some description (while working on a major project for example) can find blogs particularly valuable – not least because the date-stamping of posts discourages learners from whipping up 12 weeks worth of project reflection on the morning that it falls due.

What happens though when your learners aren’t that tech savvy? How do you get the underlying principles of what blogging is and why you do it when it takes half the session to get everyone online in the first place?

Easy – do it all on paper.

This activity (which has a number of game-like elements even if it isn’t strictly a game) was devised by the Flexible Learning Solutions (FLS) team at the Canberra Institute of Technology and it offers an enjoyable, low-tech introduction to blogging.

Leonard Low from the FLS team explains it in detail on his highly regarded Mobile Learning blog here.

A great part is that instead of a whole computer lab, all you need is:

Materials:

• A5 sheets of Paper – one per participant, and preferably in many colours
• Writing implements – lots of colours of ballpoint pens and/or colourful textas
• Post-It Notes – I use 47.6 x 73mm ones. If you can find some colourful ones around this size, so much the better.

(image from frozenchipmunk on Flickr)