An Architecture for Participatory Learning

MMORPGs, MUVEs, Web 2.0: what's that got to do with education?

An IDA iLAB2015 Ideation Workshop, Singapore, 8 Aug 2008

Overview

Social technologies and virtual social spaces have been drawing immense attention over the last few years.  What do World of Warcraft, Second Life and Facebook have in common, and what can they offer education?
MMORPGs (Massivly Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games) MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments) and Web 2.0 all share a common attitude, challenging traditional divides between users and content suppliers, and offering an alternative model of participation and empowerment. Such environments seem highly potent arena for learning. Indeed, a serious body of evidence suggests that users are learning a broad range of skills through participation in suce spaces. Yet it is still unclear how to direct this learning and harness the power of these new media in structured education.

This workshop will explore these questions with an open mind and a practical approach. The workshop will be driven by user contributed case studies. These cases will be discussed in cross disciplinary groups, through which design patterns will be extracted and elaborated and scenarios developed.

The objective of the workshop is for participants to engage in collaborative development of patterns to provide a framework for sharing their design knowledge. We will inspect and reflect upon the practices of producing technology and activities for use in educational contexts. We take the perspective that to design technology-enhanced learning tools and activities an interdisciplinary approach is required, bring the expertise of educators, software developers, designers and researchers together.

To register for this workshop, please contact Jade Low,  jade_low@ida.gov.sg

Further background

Target Audience

• Educational practitioners
• Software designers
• Curriculum and pedagogy designers
• Policy makers
• Researchers

What you give

Short case studies from your experience, which resulted in successful outcomes when used. These are based on our template. Your own practices/experience could be, for example, drawn from either gaming (e.g. World of Warcraft, Second Life, etc.), social software (e.g. Google Docs, Facebook, etc.) or the use of these in formal (e.g . classroom) or informal (e.g. home, PC Bangs) contexts. The idea is that the content for the day is driven by participants' needs.

What you get (or Outcomes)

Patterns and scenarios: these are generalizable solutions of use to the wider community. Patterns capture common practices across the submitted case studies. Scenarios are ways for you to implement a group of patterns in your everyday work.

Workshop agenda

The agenda for the day is as follows:

The main aspects of our metodology can be found in the following publications (although we will be using an updated format for the IDA workshop):

Winters, N. and Mor, Y. (2008) IDR: a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning, Computers & Education, 50(2), 579-600. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2007.09.015

Mor, Y. and Winters, N (2008) Participatory design in open education: a workshop model for developing a pattern language, Journal of Interactive Media in Education. http://jime.open.ac.uk/2008/13

The workshop is facilitated by Niall Winters, Yishay Mor (from the London Knowledge Lab), Jade Low and Chris Tng (from IDA). It is based on research undertaken as part of the Learning patterns and Planet projects.