e-wot?

I’m biased, I know, but Angeline Khoo from NIE gave a great presentation on World of Warcraft and it’s relevance to learning. It was a shame we couldn’t read her slides, but she more than made up for it with her passion for the game and its educational value. And the live in-game conversations and action in World of Warcraft was very helpful in clarifying what gaming involves and how it might have practical value for learning.

She started by citing many examples of learning events from young kids who learnt to read, to social and cultural learning, to maths and economics… etc…

Then she logged into WoW to chat with some of her guild members. All this in front of an audience of 1200 conference attendees – very brave of her. She engaged her guildies in a conversation about Thanksgiving. She asked, “What are you giving thanks for?” and got a variety of answers, religious, social, historical – showing how the game can help to engage people in cultural conversations, adding “You see we don’t play the game to fight all the time. We have interesting chats.”

Then she asked her former guild leader Trojan to explain how he developed his leadership skills. He said, “Mostly by experience I would try to lead groups into instances… they needed a leader, I tried best to be that person”.

He then went on to list the skills he needed to lead a guild in World of Warcraft. I couldn’t type fast enough but here are a three points I managed to catch:

• You need to be understanding and open to suggestions
• Keeping an open mind is helpful.
• Sometimes you need to put your foot down.

Trojan is 21 and has been playing games for 15 years (he started with Super Mario) and is now studying to be a teacher.

Then she got some 4 guys and a gal to come on stage and do a group boss fight in World of Warcraft (a challenging part of the game called ‘Ramparts’). Another guy gave a commetary to describe what was going on while the party of 5 played. While they were setting up, he and Angeline explained leadership roles, a bit about conflict resolution, and the problem of selecting members and other decisions for forming and balancing 20 man raids.

Before the boss fight, the raid leader took the mic and gave instructions to his team about roles and responsibilities they would take on during the battle.
We watched as they did a messy job on the first boss fight, after which the raid leader gave them some feedback on their performance afterwards. He told his mage off for not using crowd control (sheeping)! Very funny. I think it was deliberately botched so they could show how a leader needs to give feedback to party members (as a learning point). It worked very nicely too.

He then gave instructions live over the microphone to his team about the next battle to avoid a repeat of the previous attempt. He explained where they needed to stand and what they needed to do while fighting the last boss. (again, nicely stage-managed to show off the role of the leader and the skills involved to coordinate the group).

At the same time they discussed the ethics of stealing items in-game from other players (ninja-ing). They also described the importance of sacrificing your needs for the needs of the group. Ethics and teamwork, good educational stuff.

After they’d killed the final boss, Angeline Khoo introduced the raid group to the audience by name (sadly I couldn’t type fast enough to get their names). They were all professionals working in education from IDA from schools from NIE etc….

She asked them what they gained from playing WoW?

• Family affair plays with wife and son.
• Social dimension – teamwork – place the team above yourself.
• The ability to coordinate people in the game. HR work, solve problems.
• Communication
• Anger management and tolerance.

She then asked how they managed their time.

• Clear boundaries time and quest objectives
• Prioritise against family time and work time. Learnt time management. During holidays.
• As an adult all our priorities are already in place. My real life priorities manage my time.

Some other questions:

Are people able to transfer the learning to real life contexts? Yes, gamers seem to show better coordination.

Is there a paradox between gaming relaxation and real world … does real persistence transfer from gaming to the real world? Maybe, but the purpose of this demonstration was merely to demystify gaming so that teachers could get an idea of what it’s about and how, maybe it might be relevant to education.

Great stuff.