Gamification and diversity among students.

Recently the gamification has aroused a lot of activity on weblogs and twitter. Especially when the word appears to be misunderstood in publications. Raph Koster argued, correctly, against someone who misinterpreted the idea in Koster's book 'A Theory of Fun'.

Today, thanks to Twitter, I stumbled upon 2 interesting presentations about gamification: The first is a presentation by Sebastion Deterding from the 2010 Playful event in London.

Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents

View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding.

The second presentation gives an interesting overview of gamification and its meaning. Especially the fact that the gameplay should be adjusted to the motives of players/students/customers. This is exactly what I argued in the last chapter of my PhD thesis: contemporary youths have gained a diversity in interactive media experiences, skills and preferences. Educators should therefore address each student in their own manner. To make things easier I looked at 2 kinds of motives for students, following Ito (2008): students are either interest-driven participants or friendship-driven participants. This means that people develop patterns of interactive media use because they want to know about certain subjects or because they want to connect to others.
Amy Kim in her presentation presents a whole list of social aspects to be taken into account when gamifying content or processes.

Gamification Workshop 2010

View more presentations from Amy Kim.

Qualitative research on interactive media use in education

In response to the blogposts of Jane Davies and Jeffrey Keefer on grounded theory and situational analysis, I decided to share the qualitative methods applied for my article 'Pathways in interactive media practices among youths' published in Learning, Media and Technology. This article was part of the special edition titled 'Learning, the Net Generation and Digital Natives' and edited by Chris Jones.

The qualitative study would count more as situational analysis instead of grounded theory I suppose. However, the iterative waves of comparative analysis were an essential part of my method.

For this article, semi-structured 1-to-1 sessions were set up. The respondents were selected by means of purposive sampling. This method implies an active search for cases within categories, with the purpose of a better understanding of behaviour. This means that all students in the selected schoolclasses filled out a questionnaire about their use of interactive media (IE. Internet and games). The respondents were then identified based on the user categories that resulted from a previous survey study (published in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning). Students were randomly selected from each user category to represent the population division of the survey results.

During the interview sessions questions were posed regarding the respondent's history of interactive media use and the purpose, opinions and social networks related to these media. The interview questions served as probes for the respondents to tell stories about their interactive media use.

The second part of the interview consisted of questions steered by autodriving visual elicitation as proposed by Prosser and Loxley (2008). This method is intended to let respondents show what is important to them (in this case specific interactive media), while simultaneously explaining how they used these media. The principle of autodriving helped to ensure that interviews include topics relevant to the respondents.

All interviews were video recorded by means of a webcam. This helped the 'line by line analysis' to a large extent. The researcher was aware of the allocation of respondents in user categories during the interview, which guided the themes to be discussed. For instance: Gamers were asked more, but not solely, about games. However, in order to let all possible themes arise, all types of interactive media were touched upon.

The data analysis consisted of two phases:
1) a within-case analysis to reach data reduction and
2) a cross-case analysis to search for patterns in the respondents' stories.
In the first phase, data of each respondent were analysed. After transcription and open-ended coding of the interviews, a thematic coding around categories corresponding to the research questions was performed.

The technique of 'constant comparative analysis' as proposed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) was used for both the vertical and the horizontal analysis in order to continuously compare preliminary interpretations with accounts of the other respondents and the theoretical framework. In this process of reading, interpreting and checking, the patterns of interactive media use, including origins of specific types of use arose from the data.

Tweet the week 18-24 september 2010

In my tweets last week I crossed a line: more personal tweets than before. Strange abberation because I don't think others are interested in my daily pursuits. None of these will appear here though.

The main theme of my (re)tweets is the Net generation. This was caused by the publication of a special section in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning titled 'debunking the net generation':

• Please, no more generation generalizations. Thank you. 4:21 PM Sep 22nd
  
• Good point about quest against assumptions RT @smartinez: Open myths, closed responses about ‘digital natives’ http://bit.ly/c9ctZY #edchat 2:16 PM Sep 22nd
  
•  @sbayne Journal of computer assisted learning: special issue on 'net generations': http://bit.ly/bNlfDc #mscel #mscidel 5:21 PM Sep 20th
  

Furthermore:

• @daveowhite Captured exactly what I was trying to put across, thanks :) RT @jobadge Notes from @daveowhite's #altc2010 barnstormer http://post.ly/ykyk 11:08 PM Sep 20th
  
• @shobhav 'Google before you Tweet' is the new 'think before you speak'.
  

Informing teachers about the debunked Netgeneration?

Main thought: How to make empirical evidence of young people's interactive media use available to teachers?.

A growing number of studies provides empirical data that 'debunks' the existence of a Netgeneration. Chris Jones (Reader in the Institute of Educational Technology, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK) created an international network of researchers working on this type of research. Jones organized with this network a symposium at the Networked Learning Conference 2010 (proceedings freely available). He als edited a special section in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. And another special section will be published soon in Learning, Media & Technology. I contributed to both the NLC symposium and the LMT special section.
The JCAL special section has been discussed on twitter and blogs. @smartinez on her blog added important comments to the availability of the research papers:

The Journal has some fabulous looking articles – but I can’t read them. Most of you can’t read them either. It’s a closed journal. Sorry, only for academics and researchers. Here’s the problem. The “digital native” myth is being perpetuated in popular culture, books, and keynote speeches, all easily accessible. These rebuttals, well-researched (I assume), peer-reviewed, and not sensationalized, are locked behind closed doors.

So when teachers hear that the curriculum is being modified to meet the needs of “digital natives” – what can they do? When educators present at conferences about this issue, should they cite the abstract to refute the silly (but free) sloganeering? When they talk to friends, neighbors, teachers, or the school board who think that kids “brains are different now” can they pull from a deep knowledge of brand new, relevant research? No – it’s not available

I agree, the papers should be publicly available for free. At the same time, I published my research in closed journals as well. This shows the dilemma for researchers which recently caused discussion on twitter and blogs.

However, I am not convinced that open access solves the problems: I know a lot of teachers who are interested in my results, but who can not find their way to journals, open access or not.

So the main question for me is: How can we bring our results to them, apart from emailing a paper to teachers in our network (which according to journal publishers is illegal...)?

I tried to solve this problem in the last few years by giving presentations at schools and publishing a report, available for free via Dutch institute Kennisnet. But something tells me there should be better ways...

Diversity in interactive media use among youths.

Leraar 24, a Dutch website discussing educational innovations by means of video-reports, published a video about my research on interactive media use among youths.