Finding a Place for Gamification - DT&L 2015

In early August 2015 I gave a speed talk at the UW Distance Teaching & Learning conference on gamification and learning. The speed talk format is a bit different from the pecha kucha and other related formats in that there is no slide limit, and and time limit is 10 minutes. That's just enough time to get yourself in trouble!

Basically, the 6 minutes and 40 seconds that you get with the pecha kucha format really forces you to be focused. With 10 minutes, it's really tempting to start writing a more conventional academic talk, and with a topic like gamification and learning there are a whole lot of closely related topics that it's easy to jump into. To make a long story short, I did a lot of editing.

First, the slides:

 Click the image above to download the PowerPoint with script.

Second, a few notes about this talk:

I used the framework set up by Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke in their CHI 2011 paper. I exchanged some tweets with Sebastian while I was preparing this talk. As he playfully noted in our exchange you can't really "...hold anyone to anything they wrote in a four year old paper." In that sense, the framework I've based this talk on is hardly definitive, but I still think it's useful. If you'd like to see my full exchange with Sebastian, you can find it here on Twitter. I still need to digest his comments, but I believe I'll have some words once I do. 

I found Sebastian's comment about 4 year old publications kind of profound. It's like we're building our understanding on swampy terrain, and only after the third model burns down, falls over, and then sinks into the swamp will we be able to create something stable (on the ruins of the broken models below it).

Seann Dikkers was a tremendous help as I put this talk together. We're working from different ends of this problem, but I found his proceedings paper from this year's GLS conference to be very helpful as I started wading through the plethora of recent literature on classroom gamification.

Speaking of the literature, between the time I proposed it and when it took place, there was a bit of an explosion in publications on gamification in learning (aka classroom gamification). As I sought to ensure that I was keeping current, I turned to the Games for Change email list. This resulted in Katrin Becker helping me set up an open Mendeley group with a library based largely on her existing EndNote reference list, and which I've supplemented with some additional resources.