Gamification All Over Again

We’ve been discussing gaming, or as Raymond Lawson described it in his presentation, “Gamification.” 

(Note to Lawson: “Gamification” is such an ugly word. But, I think I know why you chose it. It helps us understand that we’re not talking about turning our classrooms, either f2f or online, into gaming centers. We’re talking about something much more subtle and much more difficult to obtain: finding methods to help our students to enjoy learning.)

I couldn’t help thinking about gaming and how it works on the psyche when I got into my office this morning. I dutifully opened my e-mail, answered everything I couldn’t reasonably put off, then started to work. I had to prep for my 1:10 class on Rhetorical Theory by rereading Phaedrus, a work I dearly loved, but have read more times than I could count and listened to the audio version while running almost as many. I had to write a letter of introduction and a FAQ sheet for a new online version of our English MA. I had to . . . Then I remembered I wanted to post a link for an online book I found over the weekend to the eLearning blog. It wouldn’t take me a minute or two, then I could get back to the real work of the morning. 

I logged on and found something I hadn’t expected. I had 200 hundred pageviews since I got back from the conference. I had fully expected the pageviews to taper off then disappear by now. But I was still getting views. I looked at the Stats and Overview. Most of the pageviews had come from google.com. That wouldn’t be the students in my classes, would it? Then I noticed I had one pageview from Canada. From Canada.

That was all it took. Suddenly I was excited about the blog. It was fun, exciting. A pageview from Canada! (Note: I tell my students they're allowed one exclamation point a year, no more. That's my quota for the year.)

Even though earlier I’d just planned on posting the link to the book, I knew that blogs, like any website, become more interesting if there is some visual content. So, instead of simply posting the link, I spent some time finding a photo of the book cover. Then, I added another book I’d found a few days before but hadn’t gotten around to adding to the blog. I found a photo of that cover as well.

Where is this all going? When I saw the pageviews, the blog was suddenly “gamified.” There were all sorts of reasons for doing the blog prior to that moment, to provide a learning experience for my students that both supplied information and was an example of online delivery, to provide justification to the committee that gave me the grant to go to the conference evidence of the benefits of paying my plane fare and hotel bill, as something to add to my vita. But somehow, none of those lent as much excitement to the blog, at least this day, as finding out that someone as far away as Canada was interested in what I had to say. So, I worked a little harder. I went the extra mile. I neglected the work that I was supposed to be doing at that desk in order to play with the blog.