Many years ago I was looking at starting up a self defence class (I was teaching JuJitsu at the time). This document was based on conversations with people who had been attacked and reading up on the topic at the time. I never did anything with it, but now that I have daughters, it is central to how I talk to them about self defence – or more accurately – self preservation. After years of tweaking and a few days of conversation on facebook recently, I felt I could publish it. My hope is that the advice here, the advice I give my own daughters, can be of help to others should they need it.
Education
How do you deal with being wrong?
Not really a gamification related post today, though it could pertain to the gamification community!
It happens to us all at some point. Someone says something, you see something, read something, hear something – whatever – but it shakes the foundations of something you knew in your hear was correct. Until you discovered this new information, you would have staked the life of your entire family line on what you knew to be correct. Now, you find out that you had been wrong all along – how do you deal with it?
Learning about playfulness from Toca Boca
Continuing my investigations into play, I wanted to talk about a few things my kids have been teaching me about just letting go and giving in to the fantasy and the lack of imaginative boundaries that real play demands. It is not as easy as it would first seem either.
There are lots of views of play out there. I offered some of my thoughts in a recent post, that play is a free form activity that is undertaken almost just because it can be and it brings fun and joy. In this sort of description, play is an activity – it follows a similar line of thought to that proposed by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. It was also Huizinga who gave us the concept of the Magic Circle – the boundary between reality and play.
Fun: It’s a funny thing really
I am still in the process of researching fun – but it has been really interesting so far. If you have no taken my quick survey – please do, it will really help me!! – Fun Survey
The thing that is abundantly clear is that fun is purely subjective, what one person finds fun – others may think is a waste of time. The Oxford English Dictionary defines fun as
Enjoyment, amusement, or light-hearted pleasure
(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/fun)
In the study I have done to date, so far I have identified about 21 distinct things that people feel fills this definition for them.
4 part SAMR Model to Analyse Gamification
I love coming up with new models and frameworks, I find them really handy and hope that when I share them that others do as well. However, I am also a great believer in not reinventing the wheel!
Recently I happened to see a comment from one of my favourite people on Twitter, Alice Keeler, that mentioned something called the SAMR model. Now, knowing that Alice is an awesome thought leader in the education space, I knew this was probably a model I wanted to look up – and I was right.
What is SAMR?
SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition. It is a model that is used in education to analyse and validate the potential of new technology in the classroom. They idea is that you put the new technology in question, into one of these four categories.