Gamification Blog Book Tour, Week Three Stops and Week Two Recap

TODAY”S BLOG STOP:  May 4: UL EduNeering Online Compliance Training Blog

The blog book tour has been a lot of fun, with interesting comments and exciting dialogues and some in-person stops.

Here are the stops for week three (with a few changes) and a recap of week two.
April 30: Enid Crystal ASTD New York Chapter Blog
May 1: Jeanette Brooks Word of Mouth blog.
May 2: Cammy Bean Learning Visions
May 3: Koreen Olbrich Learning in Tandem
May 4: I am appearing “live” at the Eduneering Knowledge Summit in Baltimore, MD. Complete with book signing. The blog for the day will be UL EduNeering Online Compliance Training Blog which will have slides and information from the session.

Recap of Week Two

Clark Quinn started the week off at Learnlets with a discussion of the word “gamification” (he would prefer a more meaningful term like “engagification” especially since “gamification” does seem to carry some negative connotations. He provided a balanced and well described critique of the book. You can read Clark’s post Kapp’s Gamification for Learning and Instruction.

Next Karl Grieb of the ASTD Philadelphia eLearning SIG provides a description of the content of the book. He describes the break down of the elements of games and points out the section describing ADDIE versus Scrum as a development process. He also highlights the writing about different types of motivation including John Keller’s ARCS model. Read the post here.

Then Debbie Richards from Take an e-Learning Break wrote about four themes from the book including “matching game results with game design. She also talked about the Cisco Binary game. I also did webinar for the Houston Chapter of ASTD arranged by Debbie. You can see the slides here.

The week ended on a fun note with Connie Malamed of The eLearning Coach creating a game/post called Are you a gamification wizard? Play the game. See how well you can do.

There were also some live appearances.

New York City

I traveled to New York City and presented at a joint ASTD Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting of the NYU Higher Ed SIG and the eLearning SIG. It was a great time and I met some wonderful folks. Here are a few pictures of our interactive session. I’d like to thank Amy Lui Abel and Enid Crystal for making that meeting happen. Here are some pictures from the event.

You can see the slides for the presentation here.

Lehigh Valley

As part of the tour, I severed on a panel about gamification for the Lehigh Valley Chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals. The title was “The Computer Game Industry: Not for Kids Any More.” We had a great panel discussion with lots of questions and engaging conversation.

The panel included myself, Jason Brozena of Caronet which is a hosting company that provides data center services to organizations, including numerous game companies. Having a data center’s perspective helped to broaden the attendees understanding of how games are being hosted and other back-end services/technologies. And Larry Wolfe of LiquidInt. Larry will introduce Liquid Mobility Bridge™. This tool was designed to work across various mobile platforms. Larry will also discussed the concept of gamification of business applications.

I’d like to thank Mary Rasley, Steve Steven Weitz and Thiep Pham for including me as a panel member.