Games and Learning

 Not sure really weer  am with the idea of Game Based Learning (GBL),but then I have yet to try it out. Sure I have been using both Second Life and OpenSim for some years now, but they are for me simulations not games. And so I was pleased stumble across a web site that offered an planning toolkit. Without going into too much detail surrounding the site as there is a lot of advice and case study material, the actual toolkit itself covers the following headings

• Realism (as opposed to pure fantasy)
• Complexity and Inclusiveness
• Learning Focused
• Flow
• Time Constraints and Flexibility
• Requirements
• Support
• General Curriculum
• Generic / Employability Skills

I have read through the material here and it has made me start to think more clearly about the application of GBl, so if you have any experience or views on the subject then please feel free to post a reply.

 I must admit to being a fan of infographics and so when I came across one for the Moodle vle the other day I thought I must include it in my next blog posting. 

Taking a look at countries by registration is a revealing chart, when you take into account the population count of the those countries. I was particularity interested in the 'Top plug-ins in the last year' which were Poodll and Aardvark

In case you have seen these two plugins before Poodll is free and open source and has designed around the needs of  language courses.  The feature comprises a collection of various plugins for the Moodle vle that include audio player, recording audio and video clips, draw pictures directly in real time. You will also find there are really interesting little widgets that include a Flashcard widget, stopwatch, countdown timer, click counter, webcam broadcaster, webcam subscriber, set of dice, audio/video pairs, a calculator and more. 

Aardvark, is a menubar based theme tool set from Bootstrap. If customisation is you thing then Using aardvark you will be able to customise the look and feel of your vle including icons.

if you use either of these on your own Moodle instance then please feel free to reply and lets all know your thoughts

 

Talking about sharing thoughts here are a some of my own of recent involving what I interpret as a possible synchronicity experience.

From Wikipeadia :- "Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events as meaningfully related, where they are unlikely to be causally related. The subject sees it as a meaningful coincidence. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist, in the 1920s."

I was taking part in a webinar earlier last week, and the presenter mentioned the widespread adoption by both students and institutes of web 1 technology and yet when it came to web 2 such as Facebook and Twitter this seemed to be the domain principally of students. Why was this significant, well because this was not really the focus of the session and yet that was the very same discussion that I was having as I was leaving college that very evening with a colleague. The next morning I get into class and one of my students informs me that the class have been running a Facebook account as a course discussion back channel since the start of the current academic year; so is this an example of Synchronicity I am wondering?

Thats all for now and again do feel free to post you own views and expediences for us all to share.