In the second #creativeHE post, Chrissie encourages us to start to think about play within the classroom asking, “Is there a place for more inquiry-based learning, play and games in higher education?”
I can give one example of what I’ve been involved with, though I’d question whether or not I could really call it a ‘game’ – but, I hope the students thought it was fun. They looked as if they did! For many years now, mostly at University of Portsmouth, where I was teaching in the School of Computing, (that Second Life avatar with a purple mohican is me – another playing example!) I’ve encouraged students to blog.
Blogging was something that wasn’t always easy to introduce to students, it’s easy for beginners to get sucked into the technicalities – which button do I click? How can I add a picture? What’s this for? So, a couple of years after introducing blogging, I used an idea Leonard Low had blogged about, paper blogging. That made so much more sense to students! I’ve also tried using it for simulating twitter – so I just gave people small post-its.
Roll forward a few years, when I’d not really used the activity, till the start of this year, when several staff from DJCAD asked me about blogging, so we had a go at paper blogging. The students seemed to enjoy it, and get the idea of what the benefits of blogging are, rather than getting bogged down at the start with technical issues.
I’ve used an activity shared by Steven Bentley about games with students to support their understanding of Turnitin (we’re doing it again later this semester). Now, I’m trying to decide how to change this to work online with Distance learning students. [Collaborate Ultra & a Google Presentation is my current idea … ]
So, what ideas do you have?
