Facebookedu?

Are elements of those silly Facebook quizzes and games potentially useful for teaching, at some level? I tend to ignore them, but a comment just now started me thinking about the possibilties. Sam, one of my students, took “What mode of production are are you?” and came out as Feudalism (which some people would think is apt for him!). Like all FB quizzes, it is an extended multi-choice quiz, with a series of questions to match you to something.  The games – or at least the one I joined before I discovered the ‘ignore’ button, are repetative quest games in which you churn through oppnents to gain experience and unlock new abilities. While I find them boring, they are addictive, people play them a lot and you could adapt the basic model from grinding monsters/enemies/whatever to grinding useful skills.

The What Mode of Production Are you quiz starts off with an extended quotation from Critique of Political Economy. Q1 asks about alienation, Q2 about which Sesame St Character you identify with.  I thought this was trivial, but the Count is a ringer for the bankers and as for Big Bird, well, “Mr Bird, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”.  Anyway, when I finished up I got ‘Absolutism’ as my mode of production (I know, also apt).  If I was still teaching economic history, I’d ask my students which are the correct answers to end up with the marxist ideal? and how might to scoring of the answers on the 5 questions relate to the various possible outcomes. I’m not sure if the quiz is very well designed, or if it was a good idea which doesn’t quite work, but I can see it leading to an interesting seminar. Given my penchant for making my students design games, I can also see myself sending them off to design a facebook quiz on a course topic.

For those of you who haven’t tried it, the Quiz Monster app on Facebook is as tedious as creating quizzes on any LMS. You start by filling in a Quiz Info page with title, description and an (optional but useful) image. Stage 2 is the creation of at least three outcomes – all have a name, description and again an image. These images are important, since they will appear, and if you do not upload a suitable image, I think you get the default “Quiz Monster” Logo.  The next step is to create questions. You type in the question, and one answer option for each of the outcomes you previously created. This is nice – I created three outcomes, so when I get to question creation, I got a box for my question, and a box for the answer related to each outcome. Fairly idiot proof, and better than Blackboard, but then..well you know how I feel about BB! You must create at least 5 questions, and as you add new questions, the ones you have already created appear as a list underneath so you can keep track of what you are doing.  You can step back to previous tabs, add extra outcomes and in theory destroy them – but here I seem to have broken Quiz Monster by destroying an outcome for which I had added a prompt in a question, or maybe not. Publishing the quiz requires installing the facebook developer app and creating a new app, with an api key and so on, but if you got this far, you will have no problems with the bit of  multiwindow cutting and pasting required.  It seems to be a nice app, and if when I find something similar that works without requiring my students to have a Facebook account, I will probably use it.

The other thing on Facebook which might be adaptable for ‘serious’ use are games like ‘My Heros Ability’ which is the only FB game I accepted an invite to join before I discovered the ‘ignore’ button.  MHA is by Zynga, who do a wide range of games; some look very similar to MHA, others are obviously quite different.  MHA is a fairly standard level based grinding game – you start off at Level 1 with some health, some credits, a few weak skills and progress by using your abilities to defeat enemies, loot them, gain experience, gain levels, improve or learn new skills and so on. In some of the Zynga games that my friends play, I can see that you also progress by recruiting new allies to you clan, guild or whatever. I think you can grind your way up through the levels by playing solo, although I suspect that in some games social play helps or may be essential- and I am sure you could design a game in which it was essential.

Two things occurred to me when I looked at MHA with fresh eyes this morning. One was that it seemed to me to be the sort of platform which would bring Alex Moseley’s Great HIstory Conundrum to the web – I’d like to see how games like the Great History Conundrum work on a stable platform like the one Zynga have. Mind you, as far as I can see from his description of the Great History Conundrum at the HCA Teaching and Learning in History Conference last week, elements of Alex’ game wouldn’t easily translate to the platform – the Conundrum had some fun face to face interaction. However, if thousands of people play the Zynga games on the web, then I expect we can find a way to use the model for more ‘serious’ content.

The other thing that occoured to me is that games like those built by Zynga might answer a problem I have in my 240 student core history class. Hi2001 covers everything from the Black Death to about 1912, and I deal with a bit chunk of the 1660-1912 material. I have been looking for a game that I can use to get students into some sort of lineage/dynastic simulation for that period; something like Europa Universalis, but simpler. I was thinking about the old PBEM kingdom building games which have fallen out of favour, but I think that the state of the art in simple, largescale multiplayer web-based games has jumped up a level in the past 2 or 3 years and offers new possibilites.  I know a few other history/game folks out there who are wrestling with similar ideas. To ponder further on this work in progress, I need coffee and, I think, a tame programmer funded by a research grant.