Te concept of gamification is gaining traction in education now (although this idea has been around for a long time, even pre-computer). My recently arrived colleague at CORE, DK, has also been promoting this thinking among our team since he arrived. For some, the word 'gamification' implies a trivialising of learning, based on having fun and therefore is not taken seriously. For others it is seen as the domain of the serious online gaming fraternity who are, frankly, frightening in terms of their addiction to the games they play. The truth is nowhere near either of these views, and so it was with interest I came across this paper from Educause, providing a very simply response to 7 fundamental questions people have about the concept of gamification.
Download the PDF or link to the E-publication
Thanks for the mention – if others a looking for a deeper dive here are some good videos to get started :
The lowdown on "gamification" by Steffen P. Walz
Gamification | The New Loyalty by Gabe Zichermann
Plus check out the Gamification wiki for everything you ever need to know…
Recently I have applied some very small elements of gamification to promote participation in a PD course at polytech, with some success. My experiment was not well-designed and there are too many confounds for the results to be taken seriously, but… since I introduced a Leader Board and two NPCs (non-player characters Ron and Hermione, both played by me) things have picked up markedly. One paragraph in the Educause "7 things" paper jumped out at me though, "…lest instructors be overwhelmed by the workload of tracking student progress through points, tokens, badges, and other game elements." It certainly has been more work for me. Any e-learning course is a heat engine, and you only get out around 55% of what you put in.