Dave, using Civilization V is an awesome thing in the classroom. I wasn’t willing to believe it could make such a big difference with our students, but once we started to teach them the game, require they played certain time-limited, or character-limited scenarios, and started to require that they analyze those games–we began to see something we really weren’t prepared for! Our students started to connect dots in their history course.

They suddenly started to CARE about aquaducts and centralized farming practices. They begin asking questions that showed true understanding like, “How do you think introducing democracy affected the educational system in Rome? Did it make education suddenly more popular? Did a lot more people start searching out teachers?”

It was an amazing transformation that, thankfully, I have begun experiencing on each fall semester in our linked courses!

@Michelle I would love to hear how you use Civ V in the classroom!

@bboessen Now I’m going to go read McGonigal, thank you!

I’m very intrigued by #2, as I tend to do a fair amount of storytelling, but haven’t thought of the digital possibilities.

McGonigal’s a great person to look at here. Her book really does a good job at explaining the positive psychology and sociological basis for why games are so popular and does a great job at thinking about how great game design taps into those tendencies. Because of that, the games she designs and writes about don’t work because they’re games. They work because they’re addressing the way people learn, think, and interact in the world.

Sooo, the shorter version: gamification is a way to add a game-like layer to things (usually for PR/marketing types who are trying to generate consumer loyalty). I’m interested in talking about how such layers have been or can be added to practices in higher ed, and to what extent people find it useful or problematic, and what directions we might move with such systems in the future.

Wow! I love your ideas. #1 is a big problem at my campus, where anything digital is seen by many of the humanities professors as somehow “polluting” the field. They really don’t want to do anything beyond e-mail and WebCT class-management stuff.

I have no experience at all with DS, well, except for a few small things. My students prepared short video presentations for the class this year and posted them on their blogs, but it wasn’t more than glorified speeches. I have done some digital storytelling of my own, but not in a AV way . . . instead, I am writing a twitter novel! If you want to check out my progress so far and read my impressions of the process, see .

#3 is a SERIOUS problem, along with the “We don’t want to install that program because we think it is a security risk/we don’t know how to maintain it.”

#4 I’m not sure I know what you are talking about completely. In my program we use SecondLife, and CivilizationV–is this what you are talking about?