Sinistar Wallpaper – Beware — I Live! (Retroist.com)

Why gamification is a disaster for humanitarian learning

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

Is gamification an advantageous strategy that can help increase knowledge and application when it comes to humanitarian responses? What are these advantages? Can gamification contribute to better humanitarian preparedness? Certainly, if you have been forced to maniacally click through 500 screens of a boring “e-learning” from the past – dressed up with multicolored bells and whistles or cute little Flash animation – to finally get to the stupid quiz that is insulting your intelligence by asking you to recall what you will have forgotten tomorrow but that you need to pass to earn your stupid gold certificate before your field deployment, “gamification” sounds enticing. After all, you figured out how to game that e-learning module… so maybe games are the key to the future of humanitarian learning? Not. Is gamification one of the “current innovations in the field of learning”? Well, arguably, this may have been the case… over a decade …

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Thinking about learning technology: is the product metaphor obsolete?

Reda SadkiThinking aloud

In my work, I am constantly discovering and evaluating new web sites and online services related to learning in some way. Increasingly, I’m wondering if there can be an underlying method for assessing them that is different from the prevailing consumerist, product metaphor. What I mean is that we tend to look at a learning technology as if it were a product that we will consume if we adopt it in our learning/teaching practice. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately, we do have to make pragmatic, practical decisions: do I use Schoology or Edmodo or Scholar for my project? It seems to me like we are quite “naturally” thinking as *consumers* of learning technology, as we do in our daily lives making choices about whether we use Facebook or Twitter (or neither), keep our e-mail on Hotmail or GMail, etc. One limitation I see with this product approach …