Now, anyone who’s spent time reading my blog is likely to already know how I like to mix game mechanics and learning. Those that have been in the e-learning world or even just internet world, have probably heard the term “gamification” been used a lot. In fact, just recent I recently at work did a talk on it and got a few ears pricking up. In my research for the talk, I learned how Deloitte also uses badges and points to reward employees who take courses in its online learning portal. Deloitte also made the practice competitive by adding a leaderboard, so all participants could see where they stacked up in relation to their peers. I think Gabe would be proud, fun, friends and feedback, shown very well indeed. I would love to work with a company that would embrace these current trends in learning and adding game mechanics as I have been a big gamer from way back and with my Instructional Design background, I could integrate many different sorts of interactions which would work with learning and linking to pedagogy. 

I have had this idea of something I want to build. Imagine the students logging in and joining a quest in a topic like say Financial Accounting or Biology linked to the pedagogy of the overarching learning outcomes of a traditional course. The students are then in charge of constructing their paths; the teacher could provide as many interlocking clues and mini games as deemed necessary for the students to build on their own path to reach the destination, almost like a “guided choose your own adventure”. Students can then rank, rate, comment and provide feedback on each of the quests for others to view as well. Then, dependent on the learner, those quests can be accomplished in isolation, cooperatively or competitively within the friendly game environment. As the learner completes each quest, he or she is not awarded a percentage or letter grade, but experience points instead. These points would add up to the total point requirement for course completion and in turn give a ranking and a status on a leaderboard like Deloitte had. I would have in-game badges and awards as part of the solution as well. Anyone else want to help work on this engine, I would also make it mobile friendly and platform agnostic (using HTML5 and Javascript etc)?

Having said all this, this is my 200th post, Can you believe I’ve rambled about games, elearning, webstuff and stuff on my life 200 times?! I do just want to take a moment and thank all my readers for sticking with me these past two hundred posts. I truly cannot express how much you all mean to me; your comments brighten my day and it’s been a true pleasure getting to know more of you and becoming blogging buddies. What’s to come in the next 200 posts?! To tell you the truth, I hope it’s more about the cool stuff I am researching into now (yes more game based learning and scenario training etc.).  I’m glad this blog proves I can be good at my research and expressing my thoughts when I set my mind to it. Thank you all for reading over the last 11 years. There will be plenty more posts to come.

In my opinion, a mentor who has been in the trenches and in your shoes tends to come at things from a place of greater perspective. They will help you see (perhaps even appreciate) the forest rather than obsessing over the trees. They understand the quirks and joys, the ups and downs. More important than industry is integrity. For me, a mentor can and will be brutally honest, but also understands the value of nurturing. My mentors over the years have inspired me and encouraged me, but in many ways I think the fact that they have pushed and challenged me has been even more significant to my career development. I admit, they have even asked me to do things that terrified me initially. Sometimes it involves, doing things again and again and again. Yup, they have pissed me off and made me cry but as a result, I’ve come out the other end better for it. I admit, I have been extremely fortunate to have mentors, but not everyone is so lucky.

Whenever I play any classic arcade or console game, it’s like I’m flipping very rapidly through a book with different places and years on each page; I see just enough to make an emotional connection, but it never enough to capture any details. I don’t know what it’s like for anyone else, but for me, when I pick up a joystick controller today, I pick it up in 1979, 1980, 1983, 1985. When I played Pitfall! the other day on iPhone, I played it in my living room, on the train to work,and remember it going to Braden’s house playing it too.

It’s awesome that I can play every Atari game ever written using the emulator on my Xbox, and it’s a lot of fun to plug in an Atari Flashback for a quick ‘Missile Command’ battle, but those experiences aren’t quite the same as playing an actual vintage Atari. It’s pretty easy to walk into a Target or a Best Buy these days and get one of those joysticks that has a dozen or so games in it, and being able to play them in some form is always better than not being able to play them at all, but the joy I feel when I get to play on an actual console just can’t be emulated. There’s something about searching a box for exactly the right game, flipping the switches, and picking up an actual joystick to play Frogger or Pitfall or River Raid that emulation just can’t capture.

iBA, for those that want to know, requires a Mac computer running OS X 10.7.2 or later and it accepts text from Microsoft Word and other text editors. We had a team of editors, who did the research and writing on a variety of computers (mainly Windows machines) and sent the finished copy to the production and design teams. Images, audio and video files collected by Permissions and were added to the eBook project with a simple drag and drop. By collaborating on an iBook it drew people from a wide range of creative skills – creating audio clips, producing illustrations, shooting and editing video. Because a variety of media can be included in an iBook, there were numerous opportunities for us, of all ability levels, to be active contributors.

So in conclusion, from the help of Apple, digital technologies have put people in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share. Most importantly the digital era has given students an expectation of informational choice. Creating an iBook harnessed all those motivational factors into an engaging learning experience and allowed/forced us all to collaborate and work together, we relinquished responsibility for learning to the student and provided staff a valuable opportunity to reflect on both process and product.

For those unaware, HTML is the nuts and bolts that web pages are built with (including this blog). The term HTML5 is the 5th Major release of this language but it also includes several other new and old technologies such as CSS3 and JavaScript. HTML5 includes some significant advances over its predecessors such as; style handling, offline storage, drag and drop, animations, custom fonts and native video/audio players. If you speak to any HTML5 evangelist they will tell you that you should be using it by now. This assumes that most of your audience will have a modern browser capable of delivering HTML5 (like the world outside). But from my research, the corporate environment it is most likely the opposite, only a small number of your users will have a browser capable of viewing HTML5 sites. This is because unfortunately the corporate world tends to lag behind in the software stakes. So there is a high probability that your users will not have a HTML5 enabled device and if they do it is likely to be their phone not their PC.

I admit, I work with a few clients that still support Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as their main browser, which are mainly universities. As you may know, these browsers have little or no support for HTML5. It is not that HTML5 is bad it’s just that Flash has had a 15 year head start and excels at rich animations and complex games, but with the advance of Canvas, it is likely that HTML5 will no doubt succeed in gaining popularity in e-learning development. But personally I don’t think Flash is going to disappear, it will keep improving and pushing the envelope and will no doubt remain the number 1 choice for high end dynamic web-delivered e-learning courses. Be it HTML5 or Flash Games or Unity solutions, you have to maintain the primary goal of making smart choices around your ideas and demographics. Nothing is the “be all, end all” approach to the problems we try to solve for our clients. Making smart choices, evolving and adapting is what this is all about.

Harry’s pioneering special effects, and of how that led him to his grand career in the field of stop-motion animation inspired me and when I say that he changed my life when I worked in advertising and animation, he really did in a weird way. I have

It’s not just his work that inspired me. It was his life story. Supposedly, he was like me a boy who simply watched a good movie, adored its special effects, got to work in that area. But Ray then transcended everyone’s expectations and became a legend very quickly. Harry’s journey was certainly something to aspire to, he was one of my heroes, him and George Lucas. No matter how smoothly or realistically my computerized characters move, there is something more subtle and organic that stop-motion captures better. Harry’s creations seem to be thinking, or feeling, not just moving and interacting with the real elements in the shot. His creatures I think have personality, an attribute that some of today’s effects artists still haven’t captured as well in my opinion.

If you have not watched any of his films, at least YouTube some of his brilliant effects sequences, which are always the highlights of the films he worked on anyway. That will definitely convince you how ambitious he was with his art. Try the scene where the cowboys try to “rope” Gwangi, in which he supposedly had to painstakingly match the ropes on the live action footage to the ropes on his stop-motion model.

You can even see Ray Harryhausen’s influence on so much of today’s fantasy film world, from the work of Spielberg (there are references in “Jurassic Park”) to the films of Tim Burton (he is one of the strongest supporters of stop-motion today; the piano in “Corpse Bride” has a name plate that reads “Harryhausen”) to Peter Jackson to even Pixar (the restaurant in “Monster’s Inc.” is called “Harryhausen’s“).

Just wanted to make one thing clear, I do not dislike CGI. In fact, I often admire it too, sequences such as the birth of the Sandman from “Spider-Man 3″ or the Genesis effect in “The Wrath of Khan” would be absolutely impossible to do as effectively without CGI. And as you all know, I myself use digital art media regularly since it is often easier to use and cheaper. Despite that, I still believe there is something that hand-crafted art has that you can’t get from a computer. So, I’m not saying that stop-motion is better than 3D animation at all. I’m saying there’s something to it that CG can’t get, probably the same way that there’s something to 3D animation that stop-motion can’t get.

So, Harry, hats off to you Sir. Ray Harryhausen captured our imaginations and for me I think is the “Master of Stop-Motion”. May I meet you one day in heaven.

In the days that followed we did a little research and I mentioned to her that Melbourne had its own roller derby league. She was surprised and excited, so we made plans to attend a bout. Being the newbies that we were, we decided to simply drive down to the venue to purchase tickets at the door. When we arrived, it was a line up of about 100 people and it was raining.  At the ticket counter, we learned that some bouts sell out several days in advance so we should get in early.

The event itself was memorable.  The game actually moved slower than I had expected.  Having grown up in the ‘80s, I was exposed to vintage roller derby with banked tracks and brawling babes.  This however was something much different.  It was more serious, and more strategic.  And while at first I was disappointed at the lack of spectacle, I began to appreciate it for what it was… a sport. After the bout, my bride talked incessantly about derby, and how she’d like to look into joining such a league.  The next several months involved looking up areas near us, training sessions, try-outs, rejection, skate purchases, bearing purchases, more try-outs, wheel purchases, eventually culminating in her attaining fresh meat status for the South Sea Roller Derby league.  It has been a whirlwind of emotions that had flung our lives around for now nearly a year before she finally reached the point she is now “Red Star”.

Kaylie has always been confident and straight-speaking; two traits of many which I admire most about her.  So this transformation into derby didn’t necessarily build confidence in her, but rather, it gave her purpose.  She had finally found an activity which she was deeply passionate about, (besides me of course). To be honest, I find it extremely fun to watch and we both also got some very nice friends out of it. Amidst the noise surrounding this new venture, her skating and derby skills are beginning to improve a lot.  I can still recall the day when she came home from practice to tell me that she finally (and suddenly) figured out how to do the turn around toe-stop.

We both still go to other bouts, either in a NSO (Non-skating Official) capacity or as a spectator, and we still get joy from the sport. So be it Blockbird 45rpm, Kaylie, or my darling wife, she has become the person that’s always been lurking beneath her surface, waiting to show the world what she can do. I’m so proud of her and and so begins our derby life.

The reason I choose scenario based learning approaches is because that it works very well with many complex products to teach the learner a task they need to perform on their job. The scenario works well with generating relevance as the learner can immediately relate to something that they do on a day to day basis. Based on time constraints and business requirements, one could choose one of the following ways to deal with a complex concept or procedure to be taught:

If you use a scenario and create a series of quizzes with simple drag and drop, click the relevant area and multiple-choice interactivities, it is all focused at making the learner use his knowledge and take decisions. I find that this causes the learner to think through a situation and make connections.

I am also fond of using a scenario and come up with a game to help the learner achieve the objectives. This approach definitely takes more time and requires some technical programming skills, but is worth it all in the end.

I would also like to stress that strategies like this should not be used for the sake of having one. It is extremely essential for an Instructional Designer like me to measure what is absolutely essential and what is excess or redundant.

I have been asked a few times, what is my approach on how I pitch to the stakeholders what I intend on doing etc. Well, I normally develop a learning strategy document to help me create a better learning experience and aid the learning process and then in turn communicate this with the stakeholders. In this learning strategy document, I normally formulate and evaluate questions like:

• Will this solution actually make it easier for the learner to grasp the concept?
• Given the audience level, the learner is an advanced learner. So would it be better to list the basic concepts and focus on using strategies for the really complex ones?
• Is this content too redundant in the course? Then I should probably change solution and try something new.
• Is the procedure simple enough that one can just learn it by seeing a demo, or, is it so complex that it is better to design some hands-on after the demo?

These and many more things go through my head, and have created a template for my Training Needs Analysis and Evaluation, for those interested in this, let me know and I may offer it to share.

• Go to the newsagent and finally buy a book or magazine, you were interested in or would like to read. I bought two gaming mags for only ten bux.
• Next, try new foods. Order some new dish in a restaurant airport. I had a Bubblegum donut on Sunday, didn’t think I would like it but hey, not bad.
• Play ‘Planespotting’, a term I coined like Trainspotting, as long as you have time at the airport, look closely at people. Try to find in each of them the punch line, something special may be funny, be sad. The main thing to know others better.
• Workout, as you know airports are very large, which makes it possible to do fast walking, so go burn some calories. I swear I burnt off so many on Sunday waiting for my plane.
• Take photos of random stuff! No camera? Use the phone for sure! With technologies like Instagram etc, you can create interesting photos as you had fun at the airport, who you saw, and as you can just take a picture of the most beautiful places on the airport, and then show it to all your relatives and friends. I do this often.

So, as you can see, the airport can be fun. If you want to get rid of boredom, then surely find things to do at the airport!