With just a little over a week to go before the conference I imagine many participants are still somewhat undecided about where best to spend the time. It’s not an easy task; there’s a lot on offer. I always judge a conference session on whether or not I can take just one lesson away from it. If I can take a bit of knowledge away that might just help me in my day to day activity, I’d deem the session to be worth my time.
As such, I’ve designed my session around this principle; how can I make sure I give you at least one thing?
Well, first of all, I won’t be investing too much time on any single point, so, if you forgive the footballing analogy, we’ll be taking more ‘shots on goal’. It doesn’t take Andy Gray and an employment tribunal to tell you that more shots on goal equals more chances of a score.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we’re going to be playing a number of games throughout the session. But what I want to get you to take away is not some fuzzy concept that games are great, but a deeper understanding of exactly how games might be great. You see, I’m a big reader on the theories that sit behind games, the secret sauce that makes people participate in their droves. So we’ll cover things like Self Determination, Loss Aversion, Social Comparison, Spaced Repetition, Flow, Game Theory and lots, lots more.
These are theories which you can take away and apply tomorrow. You won’t need to go and spend money to make these principles work for you. We’ll do some practical experiments that help you to see the principles in action, I’ll talk (a bit) about case study examples which I’ve worked on and we will be enormously social throughout the whole affair. My hope with the latter aspect is to instil an appreciation that we must be completely nuts to not make each and every learning opportunity a social one.
So do join me if you can; if you don’t get at least one thing from my session I’ll give you your 3 hours back.
Session Details: W3 - Making the Most of Technology: Social and Games-based Learning Weds 6th April – 13.45 – 16.45
Hi Ben, it's great to find out a little more about your session. Really looking forward to it and learning about how social media can be used to help the learning process.
A trackback is a method for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Drupal and Movable Type, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of linkback.