I really enjoyed the entire presentation that Monica gave, first of all. I found that it really *answered* a lot of the questions I had about assessing with games. I found her approach to "asking the right question" in order to figure out how best to assess within games to be very forthright and logical.
The James Gee video "James Paul Gee on Grading with Games" helped me along further.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU3pwCD-ey0 ("...in some weird way, a videogame is just an assessment")
Anyway, which do you (anyone!) think would be easier for a teacher just adopting these techniques:
--> Teaching using a game, complete with briefing and debriefing, reflection screencasts and/or papers, etc....
--> Or, teaching using gamification techniques (levels, XP leading up to new levels, new capabilities within the course linked to leveling, maybe even the creation of "avatars" to represent the student's academic identity with the course?
Which would be easier to link learning objectives to assessment, as Monica was discussing?
During Monica's presentation, I started trying to match up concepts in gaming with concepts in education, with some limited success. For example, she started discussing formative assessments and summative assessments. Do you think formative assessments might be similar to a starting tutorial? Is there anything later in a game that might be considered as a formative assessment? Are summative assessments like boss fights? Or perhaps not, because you can always die and try that boss fight again later?
What do you think?
On a tangent...wouldn't it be awesome if each new unit in a course started with a cutscene, setting the stage? </tangent> :-)
How could be use the gaming convention of setting aside certain monsters/dungeons as being of higher complexity with the context of a course? I'm currently watching one of Harvard's Open Courses, CS 50. For each of their projects, they have something called the "Hacker Edition" that students can complete. What can we offer those students as an incentive (and should we?) that would not discourage those who are not as far along? Hmmmm....