What economic theory says...

I know some people (well two) have become interested in this blog becuase of my involvement in the Coursera course on Gamification. Sadly, I have to inform those two loyal readers that I can take no more...

I now understand that Pennsylvania is an ivy league university because it will send you up the wall...

This clip was the last straw. If you can't see what is wrong with this can I either suggest a DVD box set of "In the Midnight Garden" or that an economist once ran off with your partner.

The course are videos of Professor Werbach as a talking head. He puts in quips, which seem to go down well with students on the fora, but I can't help thinking it is like a speak-your-weight machine ploughing through material they are not completely familiar with.

How did the clip linked above get said in the first place? How did it survive quality assurance? I would suspect the answers are "Prof Werbach is saying words he doesn't understand" and "there is no quality assurance".

I suppose that what he was trying to say is that "economic theory suggests people are indiffenrent between losing 50k and a 50% chance of losing 100k", but what he said was miles away form that even with slips of language. But even so, what is this "economic theory" that assumes linear utility curves, which would be lines rather than curves. How can even accoutning students understand CAPM if anyone has ever implied that utility functions are linear? All economic theory, from economics 1 onwards, assumes that people have non-linear utility functions. If this is anything that is being dragged up as a straw man to be ritually immolated, it is not "economic theory", it is naive dcecision theory. And Professor Werbach is so not even close to expressing this cogently...

As a platform Coursera is slightly condensed vapour-ware... the fora are full of students raising technical problems, most signitficantly  with acccessing with IE and last weekend the site lost the registrations of all the students, forcing them to re-register. The peer reviewing of coursework is a mess.

God alone knows why the University of Edinburgh are in partnership with this shambles.

Peer Review

Two weeks into the Coursera gamification course and we hit the first real piece of coursework. With 60000+ students, expecting rigourous essays to be read, marked and feedback given was always going to be optimistic. Coursera rely heavily on peer assessment. The practical issues around getting students to evaluate each other's submissions are well-known, including the difficulty of maintaining consistent standards, and the risk of gender, racial or other biases.

Superfically the assessment exercise does not appear too onerous: produce a 300 word "essay". The essay question is: "You are an employee of Cereals Incorporated, a large manufacturer of breakfast food products.  Your supervisor, Madison County, approaches you because she knows you recently took a course on gamification, which she has heard will revolutionize marketing.

She tells you that Cereals Inc. is about to release a new line of ready-to-eat breakfast pastries, and she wants to know whether to use gamification as part of the marketing strategy.  The breakfast pastries will be aimed at the 18-35 age bracket. Surveys show members of this demographic often skip breakfast because they don’t want to eat the typical cereals of their youth, and they are too active to cook their own breakfasts.  Market research indicates that the pastries are likely to appeal more to women than men by a 65%-35% ratio. Cereals Inc. has a 35% share of the overall breakfast food market, but only a 10% share of the fragmented ready-to-eat segment. 

Provide as many reasons as you can why gamification could be a useful technique to apply to the situation your manager has presented to you.  Explain why these reasons address the specific scenario provided.   At this stage, focus on the problem rather than the solution.  In other words, describe the goals of the project, not the particular game elements or other techniques you plan to use.  We strongly encourage you to watch this week's lecture segments before attempting this assignment."

This is a rather odd question for a global course. It is not clear which country we are in and food marketing does seem to be cultually specific. If I had to guess, I would say it isn't DPRK. Not sure what the "fragmented ready-to-eat segment" is, but am confident I am not in it. But then 300 hundred words is not a lot.... I think my answer touches on  the course content, tangentially.


"Marion. I think that we should aim to make our target customers' engagement with our brand greater than simply viewing them as consumers. One way to achieve this is to introduce what is now termed "gamification": introducing an element where users can compete with themselves or with a wider cohort of users. These pastries will be aimed at 18-35 year olds, who are familiar with interaction with games. We want a game approach that both targets our core market of women, but can also draw in male consumers: sometimes they eat breakfast together, if they get lucky. For female customers we might link the gamification to weight for some customers and to social atractiveness: I would term this strategy "killing two birds with one scone". We should target non-breakfast eating users because targeting current cereal eaters may cannibalise our existing market. As you know we are weak in the fragmented ready-to-eat segment. We should also target the non-value-added fresh fruit market: the grapefruit segment. You might think we should target imaginative users of our exisitng products, but psychology research has shown it is very difficult to change the behavior of cereal adulterers.

The goals of gamifiysing breakfast therefore are:
* make breakfast fun to persuade non-eaters to hang around for it;
* provide feedback on progress towards goals;  
* provide a social network efffect to encourage users to enrol their friends. So, though it goes beyond today's question, I would individually QR code the packets and get users to scan the code in on smart phones when they use them, but also get their partners to scan the packets, the scans have to be within 10 mins of each other: feedback degrees of separation to other users and consumption in network..."

I am beginning to believe that my e-learning career has been a terrible loss to the world of global comestible marketing...

Coursera Gamification Course

Coursera is very much flavour of the month. Set up by Ng and Koller from Stanford University in April, the model is to take courses from prestigious universities and deliver them free to the World. Even Edinburgh University has jumped on the Coursera bandwagon, with Austin Tate from our School of Informatics involved in launching a course on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Sian Bayne and Hamish Macleod from our School of Education involved in a course on E-Learning and Digitial Cultures, both scheduled to start in January.

Lacking the patience to wait until January but driven by curiosity to see how a course can be delivered free I have enrolled in the course run by Kevin Werbach at the University of Pennsylvania on Gamification. The range of content is interesting, giving a general overview, but the presentation is very conventional, with short video presentations of Kevin Werbach in front of a book case in a subsidiary window and powerpoint slides in the main window, with pen-applied highlighting.  He delivers the content well. But the bookcase is a bit of a distraction, especially becuase, and this is flagged up for the terminally unobservant, the items on the shelves change between videos and we are invited to work out what this dynamic set-dressing means. I find watching academics speaking in front of bookcases distracting enough. It gives the impression of erudition, but I cant help trying to work out what the books are, and by the time I have worked them out I have lost the thread of what the person is saying. Having video lectures where students are encouraged to scan the shelves seems almost designed to distract students with incipient ADHD. The multiple choice elements that are added are so simple that they could be used as tests for brain-stem function, or be used as premium-line phone-in quiz questions on day-time television, which is pretty much the same thing.

The question my business studies friends would ask about a free online course is "what is the business model to pay for it?" and the answer, as my economics chums would predict, is "deliver it with zero marginal cost". So the assessments and final examination are multiple choice and the essay elements will be peer assessed. However, the course, even on only its second day, has been useful, allowing me to identify through the course's discussion fora some developers of serious gaming in business that I wasn't aware of. So it might well be that it is the social network/crowdsourcing aspects of these courses that give them value rather than the content of the materials themselves.

Empire of Dirt

With a little bit of faffing around to get the ports on the virtual server, now have a standalone nine region sim working: a 750 m square. The aim is to put the main exercises into the central region then use the surrounding regions as landscaping: should look more realistic than an island with hard borders or a sharply shelving beach. Not sure whether there are any server load implications between having all the scripts running on one of the nine regions or whether it is better to spread the load across them.

Now all I need is a "look". Most university virtual worlds have this sunny look... a sort of mashup of their sun drenched prospectuses and the Truman Show. I think we should aim for something more along the lines of "post-industrial apocalyptic": dark, threatening and noisy. At least it will prepare the students for the World after graduation.

Opensim on VM: Finally working....

Finally have managed to get Opensim working on the uni's virtual machine after spending a week annoying IS support. It was hanging up on the region handshake when I tried yo connect using impudence. Could not find anything on opensim discussion boards about this problem on virtual machines; just stuff about the error being caused by port forwarding in routers. The virtual cluster is pretty much a black-box to me, so was worried this might make it impossible to run Opensim on VM. In the end it just needed the UDP ports opened. Now all I have to do is think of what we can use Opensim for. At the moment I am planning to shift large teaching simulations off Second Life onto Opensim, as they are used by local users, and then use the Second Life region as an open demonstrator of simple simulation exercises, using Facebook to track/authenticate users... so that should keep me busy for the rest of June.

Virtually Useless

Finally getting round to moving the Second Life exercises to Opensim. Have played around a bit with Opensim on standalone machines, so expected it to be straightforward to set it up on a virtual cloud server at 129.215.10.17 Well, it runs... but couldn't connect to it with Imprudence. Tried connecting to 9000 port: niente!

Re connecting to Opensim, what does the message it returns when running mean?

"Ooops!

The page you requested has been obsconded with by knomes. Find hippos quick!

If you are trying to log-in, your link parameters should have: "-loginpage http:///?method=login -loginuri http:///" in your link"

Open source weirdness....

Nuisance Neighbours

We have been using the simulation for an honours class. The sim works fine but hard to get busy undergrads to engage as much as we would like. And for the last few days the Edinburgh Uni region has been over-run with s cripts generating swarms of prims that drift all over. The developer is geraldine.udein, who ever he, she or it is, but the udein sounds suspiciously local.... an idiot anyway.