I was lucky enough to grow up during the 1980s heyday of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, a low‐tech precursor to the electronic branching scenarios that are now common in modern eLearning, as well as the interactive fiction craze made possible by branching text editor Twine in the Int...
I often find myself being the old curmudgeon when the topic of gamification in learning comes up.
Don’t get me wrong – I love video games, but I think the characteristics that make a great game also make it a poor fit for most learning tasks (or at least, the types of tasks that we often teach in...
When we ask “why offer Mozilla Open Badges in education?”, the answer often comes back “to motivate students”. When we ask “how exactly does that work?” – well, uh, it seems people have differing ideas.
I think that many people take it as an article of faith that giving badges will magically mot...
2011 brought us the buzzword craze of “gamification” in education, or the quest to make learning online more like a video game. Inspired by FourSquare’s achievement badges as a way of motivating users to check in to l...
(This post is part of a series called “The Connected Class Community”).
A popular reason for exploring gamification in online learning is because we want to increase student engagement with the content. Games are nothing if not engaging, and the very best games can give educators deep insights...