{"id":848,"date":"2011-02-25T12:57:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-25T17:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=848"},"modified":"2011-02-22T14:03:20","modified_gmt":"2011-02-22T19:03:20","slug":"gamify-my-historians-craft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=848","title":{"rendered":"Gamify My Historian’s Craft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gamification <\/a>is all the rage. Operation Lapis<\/a> show us what full-blown gamification can look like in the classroom; but if you’re not ready for that, there are other things you can do to introduce playful approaches to your teaching.<\/p>\n

I find myself teaching ‘The Historian’s Craft’ this term. There are 100 students registered in the course, which unrolls over 13 lectures and tutorials. The course is one of our required courses, and introduces the second year student to the nitty gritty of being an historian – archives, transcribing documents, building arguments from documents; that kind of thing. Of course, with me being an archaeologist, I also slipped in quite a lot about material culture, visual culture, and landscapes.<\/p>\n

Full disclosure: I was terrified to teach this course. My main concern was, how could a student ever hope to engage with the full gamut of tools, techniques, and approaches from a single class? As I was preparing the course, I came across this post<\/a> by Richard Landers who teaches a social psychology course at Old Dominion University. Richard was interested in the social aspect of learning. He created a social network platform for his course, filled it with achievements and other aspects of social gaming, and watched what happened. (This pilot was so successful that Richard is using it as the seed for a $1.35\u00a0 million project to explore the topic more fully. Join here<\/a>!) And so the idea was set. I would follow Richard’s example, set up a social network for my class, and build achievements around the tools and techniques of being an historian.<\/p>\n

Anastasia Salter has just posted on Profhacker<\/a> some of the nitty gritty involved in setting up such a system. Like Anastasia, I’m using WordPress + Buddypress <\/a>to handle the social interaction, and the Achievements <\/a>plugin to create the reward system.Participation on the site is completely voluntary; it is entirely separate from the formal assessment exercises in the course. The name of the game: he who gets the most points, wins. Top quarter (more or less) on the leaderboard will see a (very) small bonus on their course participation grade. So all in all, the ‘gamification’ of this class is a pretty simple mechanic: a gold star, in essence.<\/p>\n

Each week, I create a few more achievements which relate to the course lecture. I’ve assigned one TA to monitor the course site, verify achievements, and facilitate discussions on that site. Verifying achievements does take a bit of time, but once we showed students how to share screenshots, the process became much quicker. Some achievements are one-offs; others can have multiple levels. For instance, the National Archives in the UK has a series of progressively more difficult tutorials on palaeography<\/a>; they also have a series on Latin<\/a>. I’ve found exercises on critical thinking<\/a>. The most recent is on oral history<\/a>. Students also get points for starting new conversation groups related to the course content, and for sustained activity in those conversation groups.<\/p>\n

Of the 100 students in the class, so far (and we’re at the midpoint now), 40 students have completed successfully at least one of the achievements. Thirty students have completed two or more; Twenty have completed three or more; and the remaining twenty students have completed ten or more achievements.\u00a0 One student is gunning for all forty achievements (but there are still more to come). The most popular achievements? Palaeography and Latin.<\/p>\n

The hardest part so far has been figuring out how many points to attach to each achievement. Do more points signal a harder task, or a task that will take more time, or a task that I think more important in terms of being an historian than some other task? Should I tell the students why some have more points associated with them than others? Should achievements be designed that are of equal importance to the course objectives (and thus maintain the same point value?). Maybe if I had definitive answers to these questions, I would have a higher participation rate.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, forty percent turnout for extra work above and beyond the course work? It’s worth gaming your craft to see what happens. It will be interesting to see how the final grades turn out: does participation in Historian’s Craft: The Game lead to better outcomes? We shall see…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gamification is all the rage. Operation Lapis show us what full-blown gamification can look like in the classroom; but if you’re not ready for that, there are other things you can do to introduce playful approaches to your teaching. I find myself teaching ‘The Historian’s Craft’ this term. There areContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[28,89,88],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["entry","author-graham","post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-game-mechanics","tag-gamification","tag-teaching"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":858,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions\/858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=848"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}