Email Games
Marie Jasinski
MindMedia
Douglas Mawson Institute of TAFE, AUSTRALIA
mariejas@dmi.tafe.sa.edu.au
Sivasailam Thiagarajan
Instructional Design Centre
Workshops by Thiagi, Inc., USA
thiagi@thiagi
Abstract
During the past three years, we have designed, facilitated, and evaluated a
series of Web-based games on a range of topics with over 1000
practitioners mostly within the vocational and corporate training sectors in
Australia and the USA. These games incorporate research-based
prescriptions from instructional design, game design, and online learning
and facilitate dialogue between participants.  Our observations and
feedback from the players have led us to reinforce what we suspected: that
unglamorous, low-tech but highly functional communications technology
like email, bulletin boards, and chat can be used as primary tools to
promote and encourage collaborative interactive learning online.  This
article documents our observations and experiences in the use of email
games.
Keywords
Email games, Online learning, Instructional design, Game design,
Interactivity, Motivation, Voluntary participation, Content generation Introduction
A recent report on online training for corporate education (Dalton, 2000) identifies three basic types of strategies: HTML-formatted courses, live presentations and Web conferencing. Of these, 79 percent of the clients report they use HTML content, 33 percent use live presentations and 26 percent use conferencing strategies. The same group also identifies their biggest online learning challenge as "uncompelling, static content" associated with the HTML-content that is ironically used by the majority.
Based on our belief that adult learners learn most effectively through people-to-people collaboration and construction of knowledge, we have been designing, facilitating, evaluating and researching a special type of Web conferencing strategy called "email games" (Jasinski & Thiagarajan, 2000). While we have been working independently in e-learning for several years, our collaborative work is now in its third year. This paper presents our conceptual framework, interim results and future plans.
Conceptual Framework
Email games are primarily containers for facilitating dialogue about different problems and issues and for encouraging the construction and sharing of new knowledge, understanding, perspectives, and insights. Three sample email games are described in the next section.  Our current collection of 15 email games have all been structured on the basis of prescriptions from different disciplines including communication theory, complexity theory, cognitive sciences, and social psychology. Different sources for prescriptions used in the construction of these games are briefly outlined below under the three topics of instructional design, game design, and online learning.
polarisedInstructional Design Elements
The core of email game templates contains real-world problems and issues that are salient to the players.  Using a constructivist approach (Knuth & Cunningham, 1993), an email game engages participants in interactive discussion of these problems and issues.  Participants bring a variety of diverse experiences and previous knowledge to the task and the facilitator selects and implements appropriate structures for different rounds of the game that encourage the construction and sharing of new perspectives, knowledge, understandings and insights as suggested by Zhu (1998). Different email game templates are designed to facilitate different types of learning outcomes as classified by Gagne (1985). The design, development, formative evaluation and revision of the email games are c
arried out according to the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) model in its recent versions (Tessmer & Wedman, 1992 and Merrill, 1990).
Game Design Elements
All email game templates include the four critical attributes of a game (Thiagarajan, 1996): conflict (which prevents the easy achievement of a specific goal), control (rules for taking turns and scoring points), closure (special rules that specify how the game ends and who wins) and contrivance (an element of playfulness). While there are several types of computer games for training (Prensky, in press), these games tend to represent the categories of fact-recall tell-and-test variety at the one end and elaborate open-ended simulations on the other (Gredler, 1986). Email games do not belong to either of these conventional categories but to a newer knowledge-management approach labelled as structured sharing (Thiagarajan, 1998).
Online Learning Elements
A growing body of literature on computer-based and online learning approaches has contributed to the design of our email game templates. Of special relevance to our work has been recent studies in the area of electronic collaboration (Bonk & King, 1998). For example, a recent study on Web-based
case conferencing (Bonk, Malikowski, Angeli, & East, 1998) has provided us data on the tendency of gradual reductions in the quantity and significant improvement in the quality of postings during later rounds of iterative email discussions. Other findings from content researchers (Kirkley, Savery, & Grabner-Hogan, 1998) related to email's democratising effects, differences between text-based communication and verbal communication, scaffolding and support for learning, types of feedback, and behavior patterns of lurkers, have identified likely problems to be prevented and potentials to be utilised. Current literature on online learning has also provided us with validated models and coding systems (Hara, Bonk, & Angeli, 1998) for the content analysis of computer-mediated communication.
Email Games
Most people promote interactivity as the most valuable feature of online learning. Focused on the screen, hand on the mouse button, and leaning forward, learners are poised for interaction! There are many different classes of interaction (Gayeski, 1980) ranging all the way from clicking the mouse button to continue or to choose among options, to receiving personalised feedback and branching based on the computer creating a real-time model of the user. A closer look at many instructional offerings online reveals that much of this interactivity merely connects the learner with the content. We do not believe this is enough. Many adult educators agree that the most effective types of interac
tivity involve people-to-people connections. This model of learning as social collaboration is at the heart of email games.
In an email game, a facilitator and a group of players address a key issue by sending and receiving email messages during several rounds of play spread over days or weeks. Typical email games exploit the ability of the Internet to ignore geographic distances and capitalise on the ability of participants to generate and process content. In the early rounds of play,
the interaction is between players and the facilitator, while in later rounds, players come together to discuss processed content and to debrief.
In addition to training, we use email games for benchmarking and ideas-sharing activities. Some of our games have been played in a professional development context in the LearnScope Virtual Learning Community at
. (LearnScope is a national Australian professional development program aimed to encourage teachers and trainers in the vocational education and training sector to utilise online technologies to achieve more flexible learning.)  Email games have also been played with members of the American Society for Training and Development and the North American Simulation and Gaming Association.  I
n addition, we have created our own email group of volunteer players from different countries around the world.  We also provide a design service to teachers and corporate trainers who have adopted and adapted our games for their own training contexts.
Here are brief descriptions of three email games.
Depolariser
This role-playing game uses email and a bulletin board to produce more informed perception of controversial issues as its learning outcome. Depolariser is based on the philosophy that many issues we treat as problems to be solved are actually polarities to be managed. We begin the game with an open-ended question (example: Do lurkers learn?). During the six rounds of the game, players explore this issue from both a personal perspective and also from a designated role. By informing the players about the range of positions, we increase their awareness of the spread of opinions around the issue. By having players randomly role-play extreme positions, we encourage them to think about different points of view. By reviewing extremely polarised comments, we help players make more informed decisions. The game typically encourages players at extremes to get closer to the average. Thus, it may not change anyone’s opinion, but it increases players’ level of awareness of alternative points of view. Galactic Wormhole
The learning outcome from this email game is a higher-level analysis and understanding of factors that influence specific positive and negative consequences. In this role play game, players participate in a time-travel scenario to explore an issue relevant to their context (example: the status
of online learning for vocational training in the year 2004). Each player is given either a utopian scenario in the form of a newspaper headline (Australian Vocational Education and Training Sector Leads the World in Online Learning) or a dystopian scenario (Australian Vocational Education and Training Lags the World in Online Learning).  Players are randomly assigned one of these two scenarios and given one of five stakeholder roles of trainer, learner, manager, decision maker, or industry client. Each player is then asked to submit a 150-word story outlining how his or her designated stakeholder contributed to either this utopian or dystopian future. These scenarios are submitted to the facilitator who collates and posts them in a bulletin board under the stakeholder role. After reviewing all the optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, players submit their five top ideas for ensuring a utopian future. Finally, players vote on critical issues that need to be addressed to ensure the utopian future, then join a facilitated debrief using the bulletin board.
C3PO
The learning outcome from this email game is collaborative problem solving. C3PO stands for Challenge, Pool, Poll Predict, Outcome. In Round 1 of C3PO,players receive an open-ended challenge (example: How do you increase person-to-person interaction in Internet-based training?). Each player sends three ideas to meet this challenge. In Round 2, the facilitator sends the resulting pool of ideas back to the players and asks them to generate a priority list. Players read through the pool of ideas, select the three that personally appeal to them most, and send them to the facilitator. In Round 3, players review the original pool of ideas, make a prediction of how the entire group would have voted and identify the top set that would have received the most votes.
So during the Round 2 selection process, the players consider how they personally feel and react to the ideas. During the Round 3 prediction process, the players put themselves in other players' positions and estimate the reaction of the population. As one player put it, "The prediction step forces you to stop thinking wishfully, projecting your preferences, and become absolutely objective”. The player with the closest prediction is the winner! After the results are announced, players participate in an online forum to debrief the game.
Results

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