Games Help Make Learning Fun

Playful design, the blending of serious educational games (SEGs) with immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, is becoming the next big thing in higher education. Playful design works because people like to play games and games make learning fun, according to David Chandross, professor of education, Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada.

“Serious games work by practicing skills and tracking achievement, but also by giving learning an addictive quality,” he wrote in an article for The Conversation. “The ‘one more move’ thinking that keeps video gamers up all night is harnessed for learning.”

Chandross noted peer-reviewed studies show SEGs encourage students to use what they learn while playing, engage them better than most lectures, and reward learners for their achievements. It’s a form of active learning that helps students succeed.

“We learn a lot when we love what we are learning,” Chandross said. “It’s a basic trademark of achievement in higher education. Human beings love doing certain things, and learning to become a master of their own world, however fantastical it might be, is one of them.”

Netflix, Smartphones Eat Up Bandwidth

The Netflix video-streaming service and smartphones are the two biggest drains on campus bandwidth, according to a report on residential networks (ResNet).

Netflix was named the biggest content threat to bandwidth capacity by 88% of the IT, housing, and business officers who participated in the State of ResNet 2018 Report, while smartphones were listed as the largest consumers of bandwith by 73% of respondents.

The smartphone percentage was an 11% increase over the 2017 report, with desktop computers and laptops finishing second (65%) and smart TVs in third (59%). At the same time, online learning tools and interactive digital textbooks were considered a threat by 33% and 14% of respondents, respectively.

Almost every respondent said their institution viewed “high-performing” ResNet as essential to attracting and keeping students on campus. Ninety-six percent of housing administrators said quality ResNet was “very important,” while 92% of IT respondents and 90% of business officers said the same thing.

At the same time, 41% of the respondents admitted their schools were shaping and limiting bandwidth, up 10% from the year before. There was also a double-digit increase in blocking activities such as peer-to-peer sharing and music downloading, from 34% in 2017 to 44% in 2018.

Oculus Rift May Soon Be Available

Trade shows have been about the only places consumers have been able to discover the wonders of Oculus Rift. Some are miffed that it has taken so long for the virtual-reality headset to make its way to market, but that could be about to change.

The manufacturer announced it will begin taking preorders for the device later this year and start shipping them in the first quarter of 2016. The headset, which looks like a scuba diver’s facemask, has a 100-degree field of vision with accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass to track the position of the wearer’s head.

Oculus Rift was designed for video gaming, but could be used in virtual tourism, real-time cinema, and education. The latest prototype is lighter and faster than previous models with an improved tracking system.

“Just release the damned thing already,” one commenter posted on the Oculus blog. “You guys have been dragging on this marketing hype for years and your competitors are getting to market well ahead of you.”

Game Makes Creative Writing Fun

A new video game that teaches the fundamentals of composition and creative writing is attracting attention and awards. Students playing Elegy for a Dead World explore and write about past civilizations that are based on the works of British Romantic poets.

The mission of the game is for students to compose firsthand accounts of new worlds they explore. The game prompts the players to complete sentences on what they’ve seen and then fashion those into short stories.

Challenges become more advanced as students move through the game, sending them on different paths that force them to come up with different conclusions and still finish with logical endings. The game is meant to be fun and thought-provoking, but also provides fill-in-the-blank questions that help students learn proper grammar usage.

“What we’re trying to do is motivate people so they get into a mindset where they have something they want to put out and write,” Ziba Scott, game co-creator, told Eurogamer.net. “We found just dropping them in a blank slate is too much. It’s intimidating. The roles are about giving them something to play as to set the stage for their writing.”

Seeing Comic Books in a Different Light

A comic-book section is probably not high on the list of things for a campus bookstore to offer, but maybe it should be. Our brains process print and digital media differently, according to Tufts University professor Maryanne Wolf, and comics just might be a bridge between the multitasking brain used when viewing digital content and the “deep reading” brain used for printed material.

Comics, often presented like a collage, can provide a reading experience that is different from other forms, wrote Bill Kartalopoulos, editor of Best American Comics 2014, in a blog post for The Huntington Post.

After centuries of reading one way, it’s not always easy to process the way information is presented online. Constant linking to different websites is also disruptive when reading, but Kartalopoulos said comics are a form that melds linear typography with an Internet-like real-time grouping of different parts.

“Artful comics induce a kind of double vision in the reader. We fully experience the work by understanding the relationship between parts and the whole; between linear sequence and the simultaneous perception of related fragments,” Kartalopoulos said. “This is the medium-specific quality that make comics something more than simple storyboards, and this is the element of comics that brings us back to the Internet and our endangered ‘deep reading’ brains.”

Comic Books Subject of New MOOC

Educators have turned television shows into massive open online courses (MOOCs), so it should come as no surprise that comic books would find their place in the MOOC world. In fact, a Ball State University instructor has already taught the MOOC Gender Through Comic Books, with another, Social Issues Through Comic Books, set to begin March 10 on the Canvas Network.

The new course will use comic books, lectures, and live interviews with academics and comic-book authors to cover topics such as addiction, immigration, privacy, and sex. Students will “learn about social issues and how they are presented in comic books and the impact that those books have had on the issues whether large or small scale,” according to the course description.

Christina Blanch uses comic books in MOOCs to show how teachers can incorporate them into their own classes. She started using comic books in courses she taught at Ball State and found they engaged all students.

“It got them actually reading the academic books because they wanted to do well on the assignment and understand it,” Blanch told Campus Technology. “It also created this kind of equality in the classroom, where everybody was reading the same thing and they started talking about it inside the class and outside the class and in other classes.”

Blanch had 7,200 students enrolled in her first MOOC, with nearly 3,000 responding to a postcourse survey. She used that survey to make changes for the second class, such as  scheduling the MOOC from March through August to allow students time to keep up, instead of the six-week timeline of the first course.

“Every week we had a new unit and they just didn’t have enough time,” she said. “A week just wasn’t enough for the amount of material because it’s not just reading one or two things; there are articles, quizzes, live interviews, discussions. There are a lot of components to it, so people got behind and felt like they couldn’t catch up.”

DVDs in the age of digital

An article from earlier in the month discusses the growing distribution of DVD dispensers in a variety of outlets. Kiosk dispensers are appearing in a range of retail outlets, from McDonald's to grocery stores. The focus, of course, is on convenience for the customer. Personally, the advantage to such devices come when we can deliver content beyond movies, and when the kiosk becomes internet-integrated, and supports formats beyond just DVDs. Such concepts might seem outdated, but retailers must consider how they add value and convience for customers, giving customers another reason to visit the physical establishment -- or the store's online equivalent.

What is your clicks-and-mortar strategy for delivering content and convenience?