Games+Learning+Society 11 Conference

Attack of the Campus ARGs!
David Leach

My attempt to create a "self-organized learning environment" (SOLE) nearly became a "self-organized learning disaster" (SOLD) when I asked university undergraduate students to create teams, do self-directed research and produce ARGs—augmented reality games or alternative reality guides—that imagined how technological trends might transform the campus of the future. The ups and downs of our experiment in allowing students to create quest-driven, geolocative smartphone games highlighted the challenges of combining research and game making as a learning exercise.


Creating a Customizable Alternate Reality Game Toolkit for Academic Libraries
Scott Nicholson, Angela Ramnarine-Rieks, Alexandra Heidler, Sarah Bratt

This article documents the process of creating and testing a prototype of a customizable Alternate Reality Game (ARG) toolkit for academic libraries. The goal of the project was to create an information literacy game toolkit for academic libraries that was more engaging and relevant to users than a traditional fact-based scavenger hunt. The researchers started with a Delphi study with librarians to develop a set of functional and technical requirements and then developed a story and prototype to meet those requirements. They then performed limited testing of the prototype and documented lessons learned about making games for libraries.


Second Life Ghost Towns: Questioning Discourses of Learning Artifacts in Higher Education
Sheruni Ratnabalasuriar, Timothy Rowlands

Second Life presented new opportunities for curriculum innovation in higher education. At its peak, over 171 colleges and universities from around the world were using this online virtual world as a cost-effective way to create customizable, media-rich environments for distance and online education. However, the use of Second Life by colleges and universities in the United States began to drop significantly, particularly as initial studies and evaluations of learning outcomes and experiences produced mixed results (Inman, Wright & Hartman, 2010). Steep learning curves, connection issues, social disruptions, and other barriers emerged that began to temper the initial enthusiasm for the learning platform. This paper uses the frameworks of Dwayne Hubner (2000) and Karen Ferneding (2004) to further theorize the possibilities and limitations of the space. By limiting themselves to technical and political language frameworks, educational users of Second Life often missed out on the rich possibilities of this virtual world.