OUseful Info

"Playing" at Soliciting Learner Generated Content

More than a few people I know around the OU are quite taken by the idea of OUr students generating some of our course content.

Some courses already do this to a greater of lesser extent (over and above the provision of course forums/conferenes, where students can create and engage in course material prompted, as well as their own, discussion activities!)

For example:

• T189, the digital photography course, requires student to regularly submit photos to a course gallery, and comment/critique other students' photos. The end of course assessment is laregly based on students critiquing a small sample of their own photos that they have uploaded during the course. (Internal readers can read more detail here: Course Productivity - Student Uploaded Content in T189)


• An experimental course currently being run from the computing department is exploring the a model in which students create course materials that might serve as draft materials for future courses.


• T175 "Networked living: exploring information and communication technologies" is exploring the use of user-submitted newsand 'course related items' links ) - fOUndit.

and so on.

Quite a few course teams have discussed the possibility of running student maintained course glossaries, and maybe even FAQs/GOTCHA lists, but I'm not sure whether any have actually started to run with that approach...

...and elsewhere, I'm sure I've read stories of educators giving credit to students who manage to get a stable contribution made to Wikipedia.

Anyway, over on the Digital Worlds blogged uncourse experiment blog, I've just posted the following...

I was going to give a brief history of games, here, but instead I'd like to try out a little game... ;-)

I've set up a timeline at xTimeline: History of games.

Anyone is free to add to the timeline once they are registered with xTimeline and added to the "editorial team". (If you add your xtimeline name as a comment to this post, I'll add you...)

The game is very simple:

Rules of the "History of Games Timeline(wiki) Game"�

• I have seeded the timeline with scant details of three games and the periods they are thought to date from.
• The game is time limited and runs from the date stamp of this post for fourteen days.
• The game proceeds by players committing sets of entries to the timeline.
• You may make one set of entries to the timeline per clock hour, but make as many sets of entries as you like given that constraint for the duration of the game.
• A set of entries is defined as follows: Pick one game from the games listed on the timeline, and enter two other games: one that dates from a period after the game you chose, another that first appeared before it.
• Furthermore, the two games you add to the timeline must not be more recent than the most recent game in the timeline, nor should they be older.
• You may optionally add a third game to the list that is either more recent than the most recent game, or older than the oldest game.
• You may challenge as many other games as you like if you think the date, name, "creator", location, or description given they have given for a game is in error; I am assuming that you *can* edit the details to what you believe are the correct ones.
• Points will be awarded for each entry you make, and each correction you make, and deducted for each change that is made to one of your entries.
• All rules are subject to change, and I may make arbitrary or incorrect rulings against them!
• If you would like to suggest rule changes or modifications to the Timeline(wiki) game (this is a first attempt after all!), please post a comment...

As a model, who knows whether it'll work! (I'm not sure there are enough active followers of Digital Worlds to make it fly, but maybe one or two dedicated souls will join in?)

But the point is sort of this: we don't necessarily know how to make a go of soliciting and exploiting student submitted content online, and we don't necessarily have the learning design patterns and example use cases to guide us (or do we, Grainne?), but without experimenting with all manner of techniques, how are we going to figure this stuff out?

I'd argue the above game is an introductory info skills exercise - fact finding, summarising, and maybe error checking other people's claims. It also maybe acts as an enrichment exercise - providing participants with the opportunity to get a wider view of what games there are then I've mentioned in the Digital Worlds blog.

Lecturers in trad universities can try stuff out in a single lecture - if it doesn't fly, not a lot is lost. But where OU courses take 1-2 years to put together, and present once a year with fixed materials, running a dud exercise in the first full presentation of a course doesn't necessarily help us figure out how to do it properly?

Is that maybe one more reason to be trying this experiment out?

Anyway, the *real* reason for posting this was to solicit feedbcak on the game rules I sketched out above - can they be obviously gamed, or exploited against the spirit of the game?

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Tags: digitalworlds

Posted by ajh59 at March 13, 2008 03:12 PM