If you've ever played an Xbox for any extended period of time, then odds are you've seen something very similar to this pop up on your tv screen. For all the folks in the crowd who don't worship the Xbox gods, what you are looking at is the message you are given for successfully completing an "Xbox Achievement". Next question please? What is an Xbox achievement? Thanks for asking =)
Every Xbox game comes with a series of pre-built achievements, which can be unlocked by accomplishing certain tasks within a game. Each task has a point value associated with it, and each game has a total task value of something like 1200, I believe. So for example I might earn 20 points for returning a punt for a touchdown in NCAA '08, 30 points for completing a level in Halo, and 15 points for absolutely crushing Freebird in Guitar Hero 2 (I "rock" by the way). All the points you earn, accomplishments you complete, and games you play are then stored on your "Gamertag" - a snazzy way of referring to the profile that you log into games with. If your Xbox is hooked up to the web, your gamertag, scores, accomplishments, etc can then also be viewed by your friends giving the whole shibang an interesting social dynamic as well.
On the outside, the idea of achievements and gamertags probably seems a little silly to non-gamers - its just a way for ultra-looser nerds to compare gaming egos, right? Well not only is this concept insanely popular among Xbox gamers (only some of which are nerds), but a new report says that these achievements actually improve satisfaction with and sales of video games O'rly? Ya'rly!
Two points I'd like to make here - first the major then the minor. A lot of time at our university has gone into thinking about ways to encourage students to develop their ePortfolio - a place to highlight and publicly display the accomplishments they've made during their time here. Sound familiar? Hmmm...
The second point is that the achievement model can push people to explore and try things that they might not otherwise have done. On her own, my girlfriend never would have had any interest in trying to beat Zone 1 of Sonic the Hedgehog in 60 seconds. But a little box dared her to try. Bam. And all this says nothing of the competitive factor that can occur when friends try to out-do eachother's accomplishments.
Now hold on there you cheeky little Stub. You've already said Penn State has an ePortfolio initiative. And courses have had learning objectives associated with them since the advent of the chalkboard. So whats the big deal?
The seamless integration of the experience my dear friends. When you play an Xbox game, your accomplishments get tracked and logged for you and its all hassle free. All you need to do is create a profile once, and then login (you don't even have to remember to login - games will almost always either autoload or prompt you). And any time you want to review the things you've done in games at a glance - bam. There you have it. This level of integration is available for games. Video games. Not something actually significant like oh... I don't know... an $80,000 college education.
In 10 seconds I can pull up every major accomplishment for every video game I've ever played on my Xbox. Do you know what I have to do if I want to review the major objectives of my ONE college Crusades class? Pull out a 200 page binder full of my own hand written chicken scratch notes and start flipping. If it was a less "traditional" class, maybe I can dig up the 25 power point presentations, and if I'm REALLY lucky, there was a single syllabus that outlined every objective for the course. But the odds I can find the hard copy of such a syllabus or the class URL (assuming its even still up) are slim. Now imagine this process times the 50 something classes I took as an undergrad. Yea, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense either.
So switch tracks a bit, and think about if college objectives were tied together like Xbox games are. I can pull up a copy of my transcript today to see what classes I took - but what if that transcript also contained all the objectives for each class I'd ever been a part of. With no effort above and beyond taking classes, every student leaves the school with an easily accessible overview of every major learning objective during their tenure. Zero effort. And of course, students could then customize this information by adding in their own blog posts, podcasts, or coursework that they were particularly proud of.
Just like that you've changed the entire dynamic of student self reflection. The process ceases to be "what they heck did I learn in polysci" and allows mental energy to be spent thinking deeper. What you learned is presented to you to jog your memory so you can focus on why it mattered. Or maybe you can just spend more time playing Halo ;-) What do I know.
This isnt world changing stuff here. I'm not suggesting that students will start comparing their "EduTags", that posting some objectives on a website will redefine what it means to go to college, or that a few achievements will make a biology class as fun as Sonic the Hedgehog. Hell, maybe 95% of students who graduate would never even care that they even had easy access to such information. Who can say.
But if we're serious about self reflection, why shouldn't we be serious about making it easier? Or at least make reflecting on our education as easy as it is to reflect on our video games?
Image from www.thebbps.com/blog
This achievement stuff was a big debate at the last GDC conference amongst designers and devs. Some argued that it wasn't fair and actually hurt games (I can't remember the reasoning, maybe b/c the achievements tie to things in live?) while others argued it's a great hook within the flow of a game to reward the player. I side with the 'great idea' group. I read a joystiq entry on this a long time ago...might have to look it up.
Good thoughts and appropriate timing. I had a meeting yesterday with Glenn Johnson -- PSU's ePortfolio expert. We discussed the use of PSU Blogs and MT4 as the basis for the ePortfolio effort here. We'll be redesigning the website and thinking more about how it all works. One thing that is jumping out at me is that we make consider asking students to maintain one big blog with lots of categories that they stare as much as they can in ... then using tags, designate some items that make their way into the portfolio.
If you are interested in participating, let me know!