World of Warcraft in Schools

I’ve never played World of Warcraft (and I suspect a lot of my life would disappear if I started playing it!). But I have recently gone back to re-visit some work that I have been doing on the use of virtual worlds and Web 3D in education and came across this wiki titled World of Warcraft in Education.

The primary focus of the wiki is,

‘ to develop a curriculum for an after school program or "club" for at-risk students at the middle and/or high school level.’ 

The aim of the program is to use the game as a contextual hub for exploring Literacy, Numeracy, Digital Citizenship, Online Safety, and a number of other themes.

The wiki includes a number of lesson ideas that have already been developed by the World of Warcraft Education Community and if your interested in Games Based Learning I would suggest its worth exploring in a little more depth.

I would be interested to hear from any UK Schools currently using World of Warcarft to help with student learning.

Comments

[Cliff Dennett]

Hiya

I don't have much experience of GBL personally, but have been doing a keynote speech all around Europe and beyond on the use of Serious Games in Organisations for about 4 years now.

A couple of things you might find interesting ... if you have seen Leroy Jenkins before, then YouTube him and watch him and his colleagues in a disasterous attempt to storm a room in WoW. It's a classic in gameplay terms, but I also play it to a corporate audience and ask them to think about the different roles and what they are saying to each other. It really sounds like many leadership conversations, including one of them checking out and re-appearing once all the important stuff has been said!

You might also enjoy a couple of newsletters I wrote (called Generation G), which you can find in the library here: www.futureworkforum.org

Finally, I've been consulting on a project with a Serious Game company in the West Midlands to supply a large American company with a leadership development/coaching game. This is near completion :-)

Cliff

[OllieBray]

This all sounds really interesting Cliff - I'm going to check out these links and I would be interested to hear more about your leadership development / coaching game once its all finished. Thanks for the comment. OB

[Lee]

Take a wee look at this site.

http://www.wowdetox.com/

Lee