For some time now I’ve been thinking about visitor interaction with museum objects, and the possibilities this offers for sparking reflection and conversation around a certain object and space (though any span of time).

This interest was fuelled by a (faltering) project to use QR codes within a local museum, and by my experience with museum objects as clues within Alternative Reality Games; this was juxtaposed against the plain, traditional object labels I was seeing in museums up and down the country during conference season.

The final spark was a conversation on Twitter with a couple of museum-friends from the British Museum about museum audiences and dumbing down/maintaining academic standards.

So, on the eve of Museums and the Web 2009, I present my first thoughts on an object label for the Web 2 generation. Notes follow the diagram. (0) is obviously the name of the object.

1. Key facts (location, age, cultural link etc.) – standard on contemporary labels in most, but not all, cases
2. Clear image of the item: helps to give visitors a sense of the whole item when the object itself is very small or very large. Also good for take-away options (see below)
3. This section of the key facts is numerical, and standard across all objects. It serves a dual purpose as a top trumps-style game for children (see below)
4. Timeline. This shows roughly where the object sits in relation to key events, to give a broad frame of reference.
5. Quick information in large type: designed for young visitors, those with poor sight, those in a hurry, those with only passing interest, etc. Pictures accompany where useful.
6. More information: expands on the Quick information, for those who want a little more detail.
7. Further information: the full catalogue entry (or a reduced section of it) for those wanting a detailed description or who have an academic interest.
8. More Info: the QR code and short web address both provide access to the main catalogue page on the museum’s web site. This could be augmented with audio visual or discussion options (see 9).
9. Discuss: this is for visitors to provide their own comments or opinions on the object. They have the option to send an SMS message, send a message or start a realtime discussion via Twitter, or mention it on blogs, Facebook or other web2 platforms which support tags (the #bm_snake text). These comments/messages would be aggregated in real time to the info page (8) to allow other visitors past, present and future to read and comment on them.
10. Braille title for the object, at low level and always in the bottom right corner.

This hypothetical label is clearly a little over the top, and packs a lot of ideas in. However, it’s not particlarly unclear, and with work and testing could form the basis of a very workable method of labelling objects for a wide audience, and encouraging engagement in contemporary ways (but largely new to museums).

As an additional option, copies of the labels could be provided as cards for visitors to take away – allowing them to look in detail, access the Info/Discuss options when they have a web connection at home, school or work, and use them in a trading/swapping game (see 3). Copies might be in stock next to popular/major items, but available to print on demand within the museum’s shop or at the exit to galleries (a small charge for the cards/printing would help offset the relabelling costs too).

Thanks for the above ideas go to:

• The Cambridge Museums group, for inspiration on the top trumps-style game coming from their excellent collectable cards series.
• Terhi Nurmikko, British Museum, for the idea of physical cards, and for feedback on the prototype.
• The British Museum, for the excellent information available on the Turquoise serpent used in the example (note that some incorrect information has been added to the core record: see here for the full version).

The Coventry University Serious Games Institute hold a series of mini-conferences around a gaming theme on the second Wednesday of each month; and on November 11th it was the turn of Alternative Reality Games. The presenters, and audience, were drawn from academia, the games/arts industry and publishing, which made for an interesting range of topics and good questions/discussions.

Dan Hon, Six to Start

Six to Start’s Dan Hon opened the proceedings with an overview of their projects since the initial, and impressive, We Tell Stories (which English teachers apparently really liked: good news!). He described how their Spooks: Code 9 ARG sneaked in education elements by linking in-game events and deeper information into the realtime TV programmes. He also revealed that they will be making an ARG for the new Misfits superhero series.

Mike Bennett was up next, of Oil –  makers of, amongst other things, the Channel 4 Routes genetics ARG (which a colleague of mine working in Genetics had found less than educational). Mike had the interesting theory that of a typical audience, 90% are casual observers, 9% are engaged, and 1% are immersed (90/9/1) – it struck me that this kind of ratio might well be applied to many education contexts too.

I was there to talk about competition – and how my initial research into ARGs, and later experience with four case studies in academia, had revealed a strong link between motivation and competition elements; I also touched on the lack of competition in modern education, and the incongruence of this with the modern student’s social life; and argued for a realignment of assessment with more motivating methods such as those incorporating competitive elements.

After a break, where I had a good chat with the midlands regional team for 4IP about their plans to introduce game-based learning at sixth-form level, there were two fascinating live storytelling/interactive presentations from Toby Barnes (Mudlark) and Tassos Stevens (Coney). Toby was presenting a new project based in Sherwood Forest, and mused on the fact that people engage in different ways (some are happy to watch in silence; others discover; some prefer public engagement, others private) and all need to be covered in a game experience. Tassos described a number of fascinating projects with schoolchildren (my favourite being a ‘live’ emailing cat). His presentation, and the discussion in the room afterwards, centred around the idea of liveness – how high engagement is dependent not on things actually happening ‘live’, but on responsivity – having individual or collective contextual and timely responses. This is something which has been on my mind since then, and is a concept which applies well to assessment and feedback too. More thoughts/musings on this in a later post.

All in all, a varied and thought-provoking day, with some excellent speakers. And well hosted by the Serious Games Institute and BAFTA’s games arm. Food for thought!

The results of a study I made with colleagues at the University of Leicester on the use of Twitter with undergraduate and postgraduate groups (see earlier post) has had its first results published in the Alt-N online newsletter:

Twittering the student experience
by Alan Cann, Jo Badge, Stuart Johnson and Alex Moseley
http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/l7qtuceyiq3

This is the first, short, article describing some of the background, methodology and outputs. Further analysis will be provided in forthcoming publications.

One of many traditional watering holes

On behalf of my co-authors, I set off to Graz (on a plane, for the first time in years and since the security increases: give me the Eurostar any day) to present our paper on Motivation in Alternative Reality Games (Moseley, Whitton, Culver, Piatt) at the 3rd European Conference for Games Based Learning (ECGBL).

After having followed tweets from the 2nd ECGBL in Barcelona last year, I was keen to find out whether the conference lived up to its hype, and was rather bowled over. First impressions, however, were not so wonderful – with the advertised twitter tag #ECGBL rather useless to the band of twitterers due to no wifi or connection within the main building – and a very sparse attendence (40 or so for the opening plenary).

That soon changed though: a comprehensive overview of research into games in education by Liz Boyle set us on our way, closely followed by my paper (which went down a treat – literally, with my generous distribution of gummi-bears: the idea being that the person at the very back would be motivated to stay at least until the bag reached them). The Prezi for our paper is here: http://prezi.com/snzgvgwrwtzh/ – paper itself to follow shortly.

Sharing my session were two great siblings who were to share many beers with me over the coming three days: Jule and Hanno Hildmann provided a microcosm of the spread across the whole conference: Jule discussing the use of outdoor activity games to engage under-privileged students; and Hanno musing on the use of mobile devices for assessment.

This set the scene for the remaining two days, with sessions varying from board or mind games through to Second Life and 3D graphics-rich commercial quality games. What was remarkable was the level of pedagogic and learning knowledge base for a huge slice of the papers: most games had been designed with a need in mind, and solved it with considerable skill.

Nathalie Charlier's First Aid Game

I’ll describe three papers which I found fascinating. The first, from Nathalie Charlier, demonstrated an ingenious and beautiful hand-crafted board game she had designed to assess First Aid training – although the game could be won by clever strategy, the assessment scores were based on knowledge which was peer-assessed throughout the game: hence allowing 40 students to be assessed without any teacher intervention.
The second was a paper by Warwick PhD student Wee Hoe Tan, which I chaired: this was interesting in that it used a commercial game (Spore) to support an A-level Biology course, but deep learning occurred not within the game itself, but in the discussions around the use and information in the game by the students and tutors – this led to an interesting discussion in the room, and suggests that even poorly linked off-the-shelf games (which Spore was not, I should note) could be used as catalysts for high quality learning.
Thirdly, the paper by Fiona Littleton and Hamish Macleod from Edinburgh provided a fascinating window into their MSc course in eLearning, which immerses their students in Second Life, World of Warcraft etc. From discussions I’d had with Hamish and Fiona over dinner, I knew how forward thinking this course is, and the audience again provided a good prolonged discussion of the various merits of the games platforms and whether technology in itself is a key factor, or if the benefits are more related to roles, personalities, memorable events etc.

Graz itself is a very beautiful (in an austere way) small city, with a central berg and the new blue heart-shaped kunsthaus dominating the skyline. The conference dinner was held in the latter, and a great time was had by all – as the clock struck midnight, I was able to celebrate my birthday with a hearty international group, fuelled by the local beer and hearty slab-of-meat based dishes.

Tchüss, Graz; and make a note of October 2010, when the ECGBL will move to Copenhagen.

My thoughts on the way to ALT-C this year were rather mixed. The problem with all previous ALT-Cs I’d been to has been the predominance of technology-focussed papers, with little in the way of pedagogic thought, evidence-based practice or strong research – so this was a real risk again. On the plus side, I knew many more participants this time round (almost all through my Twitter network) and was looking forward to meeting them and networking; but also, with my day job now taking a focus on distance learning, I was on the lookout for a new range of topics.

Oh, also, I was to be staying with my brother and sister-in-law-to-be in the rather swanky Hilton which now dominates the hitherto rather confused Manchester skyline. Thanks to them, I had a very comfortable base.

So to the conference itself. I’ll cheekily fit into the ALT-C mould by first noting the technology I used – of note only because it’s the first time I’ve conference’d with an iPhone, which rather revolutionised the way I interacted with it, socialised and recorded (see a fuller description here if you’re that way inclined).

I’ll deal with the game-related sessions in a separate post, and focus on the main education themes here. I was aiming for those on feedback and assessment methods, mobile learning and open and distance education (including Open Educational Resources, OERs) in the main. These, sadly, largely disappointed.

Using CRS for fieldwork

On assessment methods I saw nothing of interest; on feedback the presentation of a forced feedback-read for students within BlackBoard before they can receive their mark, by Stuart Hepplestone et al from Sheffield Hallam, was interesting – although there was no solid data yet on how the students reacted to or benefitted from it. A nice side-idea from this project was getting older students to write the instruction guides, rather than staff. I also took part in a great workshop on alphanumeric portable CRS (classroom response systems) which used a mixture of well structured questions and instant feedback in the field and back in the classroom to develop and reinforce learning – an impressive improvement on previous use of simple ABCD devices I’ve seen which don’t encourage deep learning.

The most interesting OER project was the OLNet.org project at the OU, which aims to gather together existing resources in a useful and searchable way, emphasising reuse rather than creation. The questions from the floor afterwards were particularly good, with a suggestion that open pedagogies for using the open content would be a very useful addition. A project worth watching.

There were sadly no mobile learning papers of note that I could see (surely a huge omission), but one online project to support students at point of need by involving tutors in the use of google talk and wikis to help exam revision was interesting (Manish Malik from Portsmouth) though short on details/feedback. The most thought-provoking session of the conference for me, though, was Dave White’s update to Prensky’s digital natives, with his ideas of Natives and Residents (I’ve followed – and liked – this idea for a while): great discussion after. Oh, and our Twitter paper went down well too.

The keynotes (viewable here, go to Sept 8/9/10) were good overall: Michael Wesch started with a great anthropological study which moved from Papua New Guinea to the ‘I want to be on TV/Youtube/famous’ attitude of the contemporary 18-year old. Martin Bean gave an upbeat first keynote of his time as OU vice-chancellor; but Terry Anderson finished off with the best of the three: a fast-paced but always interesting look at the nature of the modern student and how they arrive at university with their own already formed ideas of the tools and information which is relevant to their life (it is up to us to widen and expand this view) and a plethora of open resources and tools which it will take an interesting week or two to work through.

The venue was good, if a little inflexible in terms of workshop/symposium-friendly rooms; the locale perfect for social meetups (plenty of bars serving great beer at proper northern prices) including the excellent Manchester Museum across the road, with its tyrannosaur, fabulous anthropological and egyptian collections, and collection of live lizards and frogs (through which Alan Cann gave us a guided tour). F-alt ran its usual collection of slightly disorganised but well attended and lubricated sessions, and putting faces to, and sharing drinks and ideas with, Twitter friends made it the most social ALT to date.

Overall, a very good three days. A noticable increase in pedagogically-driven papers, if not always supported by good evidence, but it’s a move in the right direction. And socially/network-wise, a cracker.

Mmm... beer

I’ve just returned from two weeks’ holiday in the south-west of mainland Britain (Devon, Cornwall and the Forest of Dean area), and as well as being a good chance to clear brain and reflect on the last year, the monsoon-like rain we’ve been having was a good excuse to find indoor entertainment for adults and young kids (7 and 2) alike.

As we variously scampered or trudged around various exhibits, I found myself thinking about games, interaction, and good old engagement. So here are a few musings and observations on a handful of attractions and their approaches to entertaining young and old alike:

When the lights went out: neolithic lighting

Kent’s Cavern, Torquay, Devon: http://www.kents-cavern.co.uk/
The guide’s informative and lighthearted banter, developing narrative, and use of simple effects like killing the lights; using a lighter to light moss-filled neolithic shell lamps (sight, smell, atmosphere); simple props (skulls, bones), all contributed to a fascinating and constantly thrilling experience for young and old. The keys here: narrative, surprise, variety, atmosphere.

Eden Project, St. Austell, Cornwall: http://www.edenproject.com/
Visually and ethically very impressive, this is actually very linear and non-interactive: I got interest from the numerous exotic plants and some of the information boards, but  much of the info is too long/dull, and the occasional dioramas are static. The kids there basically got enjoyment from running around, and parents spent time chasing and telling them off. There are kids’ activity books, but they are too wordy for reading as you go around, and although there are stations where the book can be stamped which my 7 year old liked, they follow the linear path and provide long wordy information sheets which the kids ignore.

A marble run at the House of Marbles

The House of Marbles, Bovey Tracey, Devon: http://www.houseofmarbles.com/
Consists of very small traditional museum with interesting (to me) behind-glass displays of board and tabletop games through the ages; four marble runs which extend interest for young and old alike with multiple outcomes each time; but best of all was an outdoor courtyard area, with a number of large traditional games (skittles, chess) and some marble-specific ones: adults and kids alike had great fun with these. In summary, it works due to a good mix of static/variable and interactive elements.

Living Coast, Torquay, Devon: http://www.livingcoasts.org.uk/
Similar in many ways to the Sea Life Centres; but differs in that the penguins waddle amongst you, most of the wildlife is very close if not open to you, and the indoor activity area is superb – giant sand pit, climbing wall (a sea cliff) for kids and adults, some very well designed penguin-themed touch-screen games, an excellent floor-projection game which involved running around jumping on objects, and team games across light tables. Superb and very educational.

On the hunt for fauna in Cardiff Castle

Cardiff Castle, Cardiff, South Wales: http://www.cardiffcastle.com/
This is an impressive complex. Various stages of use and occupation on the site give a slice through history (Roman walls, Norman keep, Victorian neo-classical tower and stately home). Much is run-of-the-mill modern museum fayre (an ‘audio-visual’ film; a audio-visual commentary to carry around which has long, adult-oriented and rather dull descriptions) but two things excited the kids: climbing the Norman keep and looking out of the arrow slits (always good!), and the worksheets for the Victorian house: one intended for younger children asked them to find animals in each room: some were in carvings in the doorways, some in tapestries, some in the architecture: all adding up to a great treasure hunt which we all took part in. A sheet for older kids, full of long descriptions and little in the way of ‘activity’, was not so good.

TechniQuest: engagement in black and white

TechiQuest, Cardiff, South Wales: http://www.techniquest.org/
A science park, with two floors packed to the brim with hands-on experiments. This was incredible. The activities appealed to all ages – plenty for parents to get involved in too – very few were out of action, and all induced learning through play in a completely invisible way. Highlights: things to take away (eg spirograph pictures), music to compose (including a giant floor piano for the 2-year old), water fun (racing boats, spraying targets), communal interaction (sound waves across the room, comparing yourself to other visitors on that day etc.). 100% engagement; but then of course this is a self-created attraction, not applying visitor interaction to an existing site.

Puzzlewood: Tolkein's inspiration for Mirkwood?

PuzzleWood, Forest of Dean: http://www.puzzlewood.net/
This small, family run site consists of two excellent elements: one almost entirely natural – the puzzle wood (spooky natural mossy woodland augmented with the remains of Roman open mining, and wooden bridges and lookout points) – and the other man-made: an indoor maze with secret doors, tunnels, bridges and a hunt for seven animal symbols. All of us – 2 to 36 – loved both, and yes, I did get hopelessly lost…

And that concludes my little holiday report, with an eye to engagement and visitor interaction. There are quite a few things I’ll be bearing in mind in my own work, and many which reinforce the already-known benefits of keeping things varied, in context, and interesting on many levels.

In late May, I joined in a research/workshop event organised by the ARGOSI (Alternate Reality Games for Orientation and Student Induction, based at Manchester Metropolitan University) project team, at Aston University in Birmingham.

As well as wrapping up the project, and working out how it would continue and spread (Brighton may be taking it on next year), we pooled our various experiences together to think about ways in which immersive/alternative reality games could help solve two perennial problems in higher education: induction (ie. becoming a student), and research skills (becoming an effective student). We also looked at new media or digital literacies too, being another hot topic which fits nicely into the ARG-online sphere.

Several coffees, chocolate muffins, Werthers Originals and live-linkups later, we came up with an interesting little project which I can’t reveal too much about, but suffice to say it combines principles from Facebook-style games, online searching and online treasure-hunt style games (like http://thenethernet.com/) to teach prospective students about university life, research skills and digital literacies. More information to follow, I hope.

Nightlife consisted of reimagining various ‘classic’ tabletop games (principally due to lack of instructions) like Kerplunk and a card-based football game, before settling on a grand Scrabble match. The Manchester crew were surprisingly lurid in their choice of words, I have to note…

In addition to the above, we wrote and tried out several sample puzzles for the project – here’s one for you to try from Scott Wilson:

We also scoped out a new collection of essays, on the use of alternative reality / immersive games in education, covering some very exciting areas: again, more of this to follow.

All in all, an excellent event: many thanks to the ARGOSI team for organising and funding it. These short research gatherings are a great hotbed for ideas – unfettered by talks or strict agendas, but focussed on a particular theme. I look forward to more of the same in the future.

An article I wrote for the British Universities Film  & Video Council’s excellent Viewfinder magazine has just been published (June 2009, no 75).

In it I give a brief overview of what an ARG is, why it is so interesting for education, and some examples of recent ARG-related work in educational settings.

Click the cover for a PDF of the article; use the link above to obtain a copy of the full printed issue.

A little while back I came up with the idea of an immitter – essentially a twitter account which would deliver appropriately spaced and relevant tweets to those new to twitter, allowing them to gradually see the usefulness of the tool without having to build up an instant and relevant friend network (which takes some time).

In the context of higher education, the immitter might pull in subject- or topic- specific feeds from elsewhere, mixed with comments from tutors or course administration: all focussed on a particular subject cohort.

However, since this idea was formed, the commercial world has woken up to Twitter, and companies and PR agents are now emitting swathes of marketing tweets and – worse – using searches on vaguely relevant words to follow and retweet our own posts (I recently received a horde of lesbian porn followers when I used the word “bi” in a very much unrelated tweet; and the reporting of a toy robot race with my daughter which included the word “scientific” was retweeted to a wide audience by the rather too eager @ScienceTweets organisation). It is now getting more and more difficult to keep your Twitter followers in check, and keep your feed relevant and free from spam – indeed, many people are starting to protect their updates to protect their sanity, which rather goes against the Twitter ethos.

So, I go back to the original aims for the academic immitter, and suggest that some of the companies looking to utilise Twitter for their own marketing emitter should take note:

• volume of information is critical: 1-4 tweets a day depending on maturity of twitter audience;
• content of information is even more critical: all tweets should be either directly relevant, or recipients should be able to see the link to their own interests;
• to achieve the above two aims, the target audience must be a coherent interest group or community;
• may be automated (via relevant feeds etc.), manual or a mixture of the two. Some manual input probably required to ensure relevance of content.

I was reading the very interesting article from Douglas Thomas and John Brown in the newly formed IJLM online (http://ijlm.net/missives/doi/abs/10.1162/ijlm.2009.0008) : Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter.

Their description of guilds within World of Warcraft (the study of which is not new of course: see Steinkuehler 2004, Dave White’s Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying and several others) really grabbed me though.

For those not in the know, serious World of Warcraft (WoW, or any of the other massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, or MMORPs) players form into groups or guilds, and work together in these units to solve bigger problems, fight larger battles, and generally enjoy the community aspect of the game (which can sometimes extend into real life meetings etc.).

Thomas and Brown suggest, from a study of WoW, that individuals within these guilds solve small problems or make small discoveries (such as finding out how a particular magic artefact works) – they then pass on this discovery to others in the guild, hence sharing knowledge across the community. But then comes the good bit. In doing so, other members of the guild will apply their own thinking and skills to the problem and solution, improving on or widening the original solution to make it more effective or applicable (such as casting a particular spell when using the artefact to boost its power). Solutions are therefore improved over time, re-shared across the guild, and recorded for future use.

It really excited me to think about this in terms of student groups. The idea that each individual student could solve a small problem, but then share that with their peers, who would use their own skills and contexts to adapt and improve the solution; but always ensuring that the group as a whole knew the latest solution, the history and the applicability for the future.

Instead of understanding magic artefacts, imagine that the problems are related to research skills or problems, induction issues, or pertinent subject disccussions. Each student in a group gets to work on one of the problems/issues, but all students get to see and apply/improve all of the problems over time, forming a community of practice as they do so.

Now, for somewhere to put this idea into practice…