My friend Marion and I are both interested in working with GPS/location-based games. Next semester Brett Shelton is doing another instructional games course here at Utah State University, so we are thinking of working with the class to design two versions of a single game — one to be played at the American West Heritage Center using the WhereIGo tool and another as a PC-based game using a game engine called Visionaire. Marion plans to study the impact of presence on long-term recall of facts. (i.e. do people remember more when they are actually there vs. in a simulation.) I’m not really sure what my part will focus on. Initially, I was going to look at piggybacking on the same game and adapting it for the blind. But the devil is always in the details, and I don’t think I could find enough blind subjects to do a meaningful study. It might also be interesting to do research along the lines of depth of learning. In other words, do you learn more deeply if you are actually there vs. being there virtually? Secondary schools tend to focus on hitting a broad range of learning objectives, so I’m not sure if anyone really cares about deep learning these days.
I am also interested in studying the growth of OpenCourseWare through Facebook, but I’m starting to wonder if it would be enough to build on for a dissertation. The guys who created the CourseFeed Facebook app are in the process of updating CourseFeed so it will include OpenCourseWare courses. I can think of tons of features to go along with this, but at the end of the day I’m not a programmer so I can only hope that CourseFeed developers at TopClass take advantage of all that OCW has to offer. This OCW + Facebook mashup could be the start of a great Personal Learning Environment.
At the end of it all, I also want to make it through this Instructional Technology PhD. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the people I know who are interesed in Personal Learning Environments are down at BYU. So maybe the whole Facebook, OCW, PLE thing just doesn’t have enough traction up here at USU. That’s what interests me, but it seems like you have to pick a topic that also interests your committee chair or you won’t get much support. The whole thing is getting kind of frustrating.
I think the location-based game idea has a bright future. I’m working on a lesson structure called place puzzles which is all about prepping people to make the most out of learning on location by wrapping it around visual puzzles. I’ll have more to say about that by March, but I think there’s a lot of room for interesting R&D in this area.
I talked with Jayson re. OCW through Facebook, and I think the idea has enough merit to carry a dissertation (or I would guess, since I’ve not written one myself–take that as a red flag to not consider my comments too seriously!). It’s not an approach to PLE’s that I would necessarily take (I never want to see content duplicated unnecessarily, only fed and aggregated), but you could check out what the UK Open University’s doing with Social Learn along similar lines if you haven’t already (Tony Hirst took on Martin’s preso at this year’s Open Ed conference on this subject–imo the most exciting presentation of the conference).
And of course the whole gaming thing is still strong enough to carry a dissertation any way you want to go. Depth of learning is exciting to me, especially in the scenario you’ve framed it. And if you have support of your committee, I’d say go with the flow, and be glad you’re not too interested in it, as that may help subdue frustrations that may lie ahead!
Good luck, and congrats on getting this far.