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.

End of The Road

The MBA Second Life exercise ended. Ended up a close run between two groups, both making sensible decisions. The third group slowly slipped behind, making some strange decisions, so not sure how educational this has been. Two groups getting marks of 84 and one getting 27: no tendency for group marks to regress towards the mean here! It will be interesting to read the students' reflections on the exercise. The exercise was badly affected by the difficulties of getting the Second Life viewer working on the Business School's pcs now that they have been upgraded to Windows 7. Just ran in to Frank Lassard who suggested that I should have used the Phoenix viewer instead as education had similar problems, so hopefully the problem will be sorted when the exercise is used for an honours course after Christmas.

Impact of Assessment

This is the first time that we have had the performance of groups in the simulation tied directly to a mark that the students get for their operations management course. The logic for this was that by making it count a small part towards the course mark students would be motivated to analyse the decisions they make. It was decided to link it to the amount of cash their company has at a cut-off date next week because tying it to assets leads to end game strategies of running up high inventories. The students also get a good brain-washing on their courses about Lean. The effect seems to have been a tendency to cut inventories and maximise cash in the short-term, but then find that this constrains a policy to increase throughput by cutting prices because there is not the material coming down the pipeline to allow it. Simple insights like realising that with no uncertainty about the delivery of raw materials it makes sense to make the frging buffes stocks either zero or a multiple of the current batch quantity: if the batch quantity is six a buffer of two does not allow a batch to be brought forward in response to an unforeseen increase in sales.

Tying the results to assessment has also limited the role of the lecturer in coaching the groups on what they are doing. Where in the non-assessed past the lecturer would email students to inquire why they made decisions and gently pointing out alternatives, the lecturer now feels that any coaching would give the coached an unfair advantage. He has put down a series of questions on the website though to ry to get them to think about what they are doing, but I cannot see evidence that they have read any of it.

Excel Spreadsheets

Asked this morning to set up the decision screens in the factories to produce Excel spreadsheet versions of the historical data to help the students "reflect" on how the exercise has gone. (I think "reflect" might be a euphemism for identifying the guilty...). Compared to some of the weird requests I am asked to make, this was a piece of cake. Just used ExcelLibrary (http://code.google.com/p/excellibrary/) to dump database tables into Excel spreadsheet files on the server then put links into the ASP.NET website. The files are enormous, so that should keep the students occupied for an hour or two.

Prima Colazione del Cane

Spotted today that one of the MBA students had cut a price yesterday for one item to one customer to £3000, when I presume they meant to cut it to £30000. As this is below the scrap value, result was massive surge in orders from this one customer for this one assembly. Pointed this out and was told this rapid descent into mayhem would be "educational" for the students. I then pointed out that having large numbers of orders placed on this item everyday feeding through to the requirement for forgings would generate inventory at a rate that would crash the simulation in eight hours, at which point the educational attractiveness of chaos went out of the window. The boss dived in and reset the value and I had to write a mod fast to wipe out the orders generated by the assumed mistake. I am not sure how pedagocically sound this action is.

The planning system has still thrown a surge of inventory on one family of parts into this factory, so maybe one of the students might spot this and realise increasing the capacity, if only short-term, might stop it all gumming up.

Second Life MBA Class

I have been drafted in to sort out some odd little technical quirks with the simulation in Second Life. It is now being used by the current MBA class. Nice to see that the edicts that students should not appear as non-humans are being ignored. We seem to have a rich collection of furries... plus a robot, who I think is Japanese, so no cultural stereotypes here!

The simulation is set up with high inventory and low resource utilisations, just to make sure it does not spiral out of control while students are getting acquainted with it. But this means it takes time for sales managers to realise that cutting prices a bit will start to increase sales and thus get the factories running more efficiently.

Opensim

Following the price hike from Linden I have been asked to look at moving our virtual worlds presence from Second Life to OpenSim. It will be cheaper and demonstrate our touching faith in open software. On the suggestion that we close down the SL region immediately and shift everything across for the start of the coming semester our faith in open source in general and OpenSim in particular was found to be less rock-solid, so the plan is to run them in parallel in the coming year. Aim is to run OpenSim on a virtual server with 4GB RAM and Windows 2008 R2, but not sure exactly how much virtual real estate this will give us, and get it set up by the start of semester in mid-September. What could possibly go wrong?

Tweetject

A colleague pointed me to an article by Julian Bleecker (http://www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf) discussing blogjects, inanimate devices that blog and I thought that this could be useful in virtual simulation exercises. The simulation is running 24/7, so it would be useful to have avatars in the simulation communicate to participants not currently inworld about what is happening. So as a trial I have set up the factory simulation to generate tweets on my ShaleBing account whenever the factory fails to meet customer orders. Getting the simulation to generate tweets is very easy, but getting it to generate messages with enough variety to make it almost seem a real person is sending them is a bit trickier. We will see whether this is useful when it is used in class next semester.

Shrinking World

Heard on the Radio 4 PM programme yesterday afternoon that Linden Labs, the operators of Second Life, are laying off 30% of their staff. More details . The coverage was very negative, arguing the virtual world bubble had burst and it was all going to go a bit Friends Reunited. A lot of it does indeed look pretty pointless. However, the difference is that there are uses of Second Life that have some commercial logic and don't just depend on the buzz. In maintaining an island in Second Life for management simulations we are effectively doing two things: paying to have a server maintained and being able to make the simulations very accessible to casual visitors. If Linden Labs slipped over the side of their flat virtual World tomorrow the simulation could be shifted onto an Opensim server that we would have to maintain in the uni: but I just do not want the hassle. I suppose as a contingency it makes sense to create a shadow version on Opensim, but it is even more of a hassle to do this if we are not sure we will need to. I will add it to the to-do list...

Back to the Virtual Factory

Have sorted out the Summer's shopping list of developments. The aim is to use the simulation for the autumn MBA Operations Management class. Before then I have to develop the links with Facebook. Have put a rudimentary Facebook app at http://apps.facebook.com/clemency/ Doesn't do a lot. Runs on an ASP.NET server using the SDK at http://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com/ Indisputably the worst documented piece of software I have ever used, and not a lot available on the web to help.

Sorting out a few problems.

I have been asked to sort out a few problems with the Factory Simulation. We have been using it within courses but I have been asked to put the documentation on-line and tidy up the exercises so that we don't need a tutor standing over the students while they use it. The most significant technical problem we need to tackle is to make sure that if SL, the uni server or the networks go down it will be possible to bring the simulation back near the point it crashed. You would think we would have thought about this at the start!

Anyway, I have been given a six weeks to get it sorted so that a more robust and idiot-proofed version will be available for the new semester....

Another New Dawn

When I said in my last post that I didnt think anyone in the Uni reads this blog, I was wrong. No comments on the blog, no emails to me, but I get dragged in to see the boss who says that someone has complained that I was being negative about Vue as a whole, which I dont think I was. So I have now promised to keep saying on this blog that everything is hunky-dory and we love all the other schools developing on Vue.

Anyway, to reiterate, everything is hunky-dory and we love all the other schools developing on Vue.

Back to Second Life

I thought I had escaped the tedium of Second Life development, but now I have been thrown back in.

To state the glaringly obvious, the Management School lost interest in Second Life because we (they?) could not see how it would actually support our teaching. Also, apparently, we got into what in Scotland is termed a "rammy" with our neighbours in Second Life, ACE, the Uni's school of Arts, Culture and sonething beginning with "e", who would not remove their big pile of virtual crap next to the Second Life Mangement School. My boss threw all the toys out of the pram and said that if they thought it was a cute postmodernist point to make the uni's presence on second life look like a cyber-breakers-yard and the other depts, who did not have to exist next to this mess, thought it was cool, then why should we put effort in. I did point out that in all the issues raised with Education I had, in spite of his anger management issues, been able to negotiate acceptable compromises, but he just wanted to go over to their office and whack them. "They can stick that in their post-Barthist World-order", he said. . To be fair, the problem with ACE is that they actually want (love?) to stand up in front of audiences and say "We are are proud that ACE's bit of Second Life looks like a tip", as they did in a seminar before Chrstmas, but no-one in this uni has the gall to tell them that this is not supportive of the uni's involvement. I was told that if that was their attitude the whole lot of them could taking a running jump: why should we do anything to make Edinburgh's presence in SL look better and then have everyone clap along with the idea that it should look like a mess?

So I reasonably thought that Second Life was so much last year... we are now into 2008, with its blank calendar pages rolling before us like the Russian steppes, but these things come back to bite us. So now, I learn, the management school's strategy is that the building on the main island is on hold and we (I?) should now promote the activities in Vue NW, where I am now told we have developed a management simulation. Bloody marvellous... I cant bloody wait.

I suppose this will become another boondoggle to keep people from actually doing something so coarse as actually teaching students about management...

Sod the lot of them I say... fortunately, despite my colleagues always making a big thing about the sociological impacts of blogging, they dont read these things.

Graphics Cards

For Second Life to be useful in education it needs students to be able to access it, both from open-access computers in the uni and from their own computers. Unfortunately, when the specification for the uni computers was set it was not expected that students would be doing anything so frivolous as MUVE, so the graphics capbilities are very poor, and most students will be using basic laptops as their own computers, so again will not be exactly cutting edge for graphics. It looks like a lot of these problems are hidden because the people developing SL in universities are the tech enthusiasts who have high spec computers. Up until this week I was using a Radeon X300 graphics card, but then my viewer started to crash randomly, and having updated drivers and ploughed through the SL wikis I found that this card has "known issues": known but not explained. I have now upgraded to a Radeon 1550 with 250 MB, and it is lovely: I can see for miles and the sea ripples most attractively. However the graphics requirements "REQUIRED to run Second Life successfully" listed on the SL website website are limted. In particular, there is no guarantee that SL will run with Intel graphics. When we roll-out Second Life for courses we will find out whether this is a problem or not. V exciting!