Bronwyn Stuckey

Hi All

I am just getting into this conversation. I have been working in a project here in Australia to 'gamify' acitvity within an educator professional development community of practice. The project is called PLANE ( http://plane.edu.au ). It is a Federally funded Digital Revolution project to support teachers nationally in using ICT with quality pedagogies in education.The community activity is accredited with Australian teaching regulatory bodies and counts toward teacher continuing accreditation.

We built our eight level game layer framework around the the Joseph Campbell framework of The Hero's Journey. Teachers enter a Hero and can level up through to Ninja and finally Maven. The idea is that they embark on an epic journey and face many challenges, realising the value of colleagues in conquering these and emerge back in their homeland as leaders. Their activity in the community gains them points, badges, missions, status and levels etc. We have worked very hard to engage teachers in meaningful actities and many of the awards and rewards are earned only through evidenced professional activity. Into this we have built a peer review process (higher levels support the lower), roles, social gifting of rewards with a view to recognition and community ownership of the game layer.

We have worked with Badgeville as the SOAS architeture for the game layer but all the content and rewards etc are designed by educators. It has been a 12 month process to get the first levels of the game layer into the burgeoning community and we are now at the the particpatory design phase where we are running, surveys, focus groups and interview to form a steering committee to evaluate the early design and effectiveness and to form an informed steering committee to take the project forward.

We have been dealing with a lot of tensions in this design. See attached PDF file of a very recent presentation I gave the the Games for Change Summit here in Australia. I do have to say I am having a blast with this convergence of my two greatest academic loves/areas of research - games and communities of practice.

Hi Janet

I am very keen to consider video in both F2F and online interviews more. I have bought a couple of flipcams so that I can do quick adhoc, on the spot interviews and have other people interview each other (video reporting). Added to that I am keen to represent results in video vignettes. There just seems to be too much text in all our lives and my research is academic yes, but I want to inform practice not just impress others in academe, if you know what I mean ;-). I think video will produce data that can be very accessible and in a way better honour the people who are contributors to our studies.

Janet,

I am very interested in the use of visual content and activities as part of the interview. I hope there will be time in our meeting to talk about the Q Method as it particularly interests me as an interesting trigger to discussion. In reading the book it seemed to me that there was a lot more, even if simple hooks, that I could be doing to enliven my interviews (both for interviewees and for myself). I usually use skype with just VOIP (no video) .

I have a set of interviews coming up in the next month or and am honing in on practices that will make them effective and rewarding. I will be interviewing K-12 teachers about their use of unit of work in an online virtual world program and their sense of professional agency in implementation of the program. I will likely interview 20 people and I want to make sure that it is a lively, fresh and enjoyable experience eaqch time and yields quality data.

I am even considering the unstructured end of the spectrum and allowing interviewees to tell their story but am uncertain of how to implement/scaffold this effectively and creatively.

MMM... lots to consider....

I am fascinated that you posed this question. I have never considered nor struck any kind of subdefuge from my interviewees. In all cases I have had contact with them and, as your book suggests, have developed some rapport/relationship with them to make the interview process more relaxed. I am not sure other than in examinations or work interviews why we would need to verify the identity of an interviewee.

Ordered mine from Amazon but the International shipping was messed up and the book will not be with me until Wed. So hoping to speed read as and where needed in the discussions when I get it.