Admit it, didn’t the title of this post catch your eye? Coming back from vacation and digging into my feeds I found this interesting article from Wired – Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning is Wrong. While the title makes a sweeping statement, I found that’s not what the article is really about. Perhaps the reporter needed to relearn a thing or two and forget a few too. As an instructional designer, there is a lot of common sense in this article that I directly apply to creating learning solutions. However, there are two really interesting points that caught my attention and linked back to some ideas I had written about before (you can read those here and here).

‘Gamification’ is a term that one comes across very often. Some of us love it, some of us might even hate it; but nobody can ignore it!

As gamification gradually finds its way into the realm of education, more and more educators are voicing their criticism or admiration for it. Despite the criticism, the gamification of education is here to stay.

This week, we take a closer look at ‘Gamification’ and what various L&D professionals think about it. Below are our top 5 GBL links from this week. Read them, share them or bookmark them.

With our increasing focus on Game Based Learning, each week sees us sharing interesting articles and resources about Game Based Learning on varied social networking platforms. While many of you follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we do realize that keeping a track of all the tweets/ posts, given the high proliferation and dynamic nature of information, is difficult, to say the least.

Hence, to ensure that you do not miss out on all the great links we share and also with a view to building a knowledge repository, every week, we shall be publishing a quick summary post of our best shared material from the week before.

There sure are lot of learning design community folks who love to play digital games.

It’s always interesting to hear gamers talk about why they play certain genres of games and what aspects of those games they love.

What is even more impressive is the passion and motivation that gets individuals to play these games.

After being hooked onto Angry Birds, I now find myself fascinated by a collection of games hosted on a website called http://www.physicsgames.net.

As you must have already guessed, this website showcases numerous physics-based online games developed in Flash.

Stumbled on this cool article from IGN earlier today that lists ten trends in gaming ten years from now. It attempts to describe briefly what games we’ll be playing in ten years time. Sony Entertainment (a big publisher of games) invited several leading game-makers to discuss what video game development will look like in a decade.

The list in the article was based on their discussion. Very interesting, take a look.

I spent close to a year laboring under the delusion that game based learning was all about incorporating course material into a game. After all, what else could it be? If I incorporate all the course learning objectives into a game setting and keep score – it qualifies as game based learning doesn’t it?

No! It doesn’t!

Research suggests that if learners are able to score and win the game without learning, they are more likely to do so. So what conclusion can we draw here?

I came across a challenge posted on the Innocentive website titled – Games for Health: Inspiring Adolescents to take Control of their Health. This challenge was posted by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N). The purpose of the challenge is to seek ideas for the design of a video game that would inspire and empower kids with chronic diseases to become more engaged in managing their own illnesses.

From my first space themed set at age six, into the Technic range in my teens and twenties, I continue to indulge my fascination for Lego brick sets. I’m what is termed an AFOL – Adult Fan of Lego; I believe it had and continues to have implications for how I structure my thoughts and activities that involve work & play. I’ve written before that play is significant for learning through what seems like an abnormally long human childhood (for an animal our size). Oftentimes, I attribute my few creative skills to extensive play, building with Lego being a substantial part of it.

I came across a blog-post by Clark Aldrich titled – Using Serious Games and Simulations: A Quick and Dirty Guide . In this post, Clark talks about:

• What simulations are and aren’t
• Where simulations fit in an organizations’ flow of skills
• Best practices in designing and creating simulations

After reading the post, I browsed the web for examples of simulations that are capable of generating a powerful learning experience. One that really struck a chord was – Inside the Haiti Earthquake.  Inside the Haiti Earthquake is a first-person simulation based on documentary footage from Haiti and real-life decision scenarios.

I’ve been obsessing about the design of games lately and have attempted to study some of the patterns of good games. First off, these observations are driven mainly by the games I’m playing on and off currently – Patapon 1 & 2, Crysis, the Sims 3, Civilization 5, Angry Birds, and Need for Speed. Of these, Patapon is the one I’m enjoying the most as I compete against my six-year-old, and more so because it’s a very quirky, interesting game that runs on a portable platform with a very cool game mechanic.

A very popular myth surrounding game-based learning is that it involves learning through video games. This article showcases The Healing Blade, a card game which is slowly gaining popularity among medical students in the United States.

The Healing Blade is a card game that teaches budding Med students the ins and outs of infectious disease. It was created by two doctors, Francis Kong and Arun Mathews, who founded the game company Nerdcore Learning.