TenCompetence Winterschool 2009 has taken place. Now it's time for some reflection on what was going on there.
First of all, together with Tanja Kohn from Innsbruck University I gave a presentation on Game Based Learning and Cultural Issues and Opportunities right on the first day. Here are the slides:

Here is some explanation of the background that inspired us to combine the different topics mentioned in the slides: First of all, we base our theory on the assertion that gaming is a cross cultural phenomenon. Even though there may be different key motivation drivers in different cultures, gaming is equally popular, naturally foremostly among the younger generation. Gaming thus is a sort of universal language with a high degree of intrinsic attractiveness.

The second point is that when addressing the educational context, it is clear that language learning in particular helps people to build their foundation of being able to access educational content that would otherwise be out of reach, shielded by the language barrier. Obviously, the English language here is of highest relevance, followed by other world languages of decreasing order. 

The third point thus is to find ways of dealing with infrastructural concerns (an issue which is for example approached by the OLPC project) as well as instructional gaming design concepts to boost the educational scenarios in place (or building up an educational system altogether if there is none in place).  It is our bet that this can be achieved with making use of virtualized learning infrastructures that provide a fair level of immersiveness by simulation/representation of realtime interaction over a distance. However, considering infrastructural constraints it is necessary to aim lower and first come up with a flexible instructional game learning design that is scalable down to more crude technological environments, or even non-technological contexts. That is how conceptional game design patterns come into play that can be used to 

• enrich conventional learning with modes of gaming,
• enrich classical distance learning with modes of gaming,
• form a game based learning environment from scratch,
• identify infrastructural requirements for technologically augmented learning depending on the context (domains, formal or informal education, target audience, etc.)

For example, language learning can be augmented with role play patterns that simulate training on the job or similar scenarios that are more culturally able to be contextualized, while incorporating game patterns like competition, collaborative gaming, resource balancing and many more.

Reflecting on how the session went we have to be self-critical and admit that the session was not hugely successful, because we had a surprisingly little number of attendees. This was partly due to another parallel session on mashup/web 2.0 learning that drew most other people away from us. Being confronted with as little as 6 attendees we changed the mode of the session spontaneously to an open discussion in order to engage as best we could the little number of participants. We received feedback from 4 of the participants, 2 of which were devastatingly negative because they had expected a more well-structured presentation. 2 others, however were very positive as they found the open discussion to be of interest and good quality because of its interactive nature. Fair to say those were also the 2 most active participants :P.

The result of the session can be subsumed to the extent that the approach taken is quite relevant for the global knowledge society, but not necessarily to the EU context as such (language learning is truly not an issue here as much as when including 3rd world contexts). Our statement is in line with one of the grand challenges of TEL that states that education is often blocked by political and/or cultural barriers, which can be overcome by making use of the universal phenomenon of gaming.

Other contributions of the Winterschool were also of high interest. A Highlight was definitely Wolf Hilzensauer's and Sandra Schaffert's tremendous unbiased approach of educational theories and didactic concepts to be found on monsteracademy.wordpress.com.The intriguing concept of creating the somewhat absurd scenario of a "Monster Academy" achieved a very successful way of decontextualizing the scenario from the actual content, enabling a much clearer view on the concepts approached as when it would be inlined into some larger research agenda that seeks to sell itself.

Other Highlights were Albert Angehrns and Katrina Maxwell's powerful learning networks approach called Tentube, intersting preliminary results to be found here.

A very interesting and challenging late night session was presented by Jocelyn Manderveld, in which the audience was to reflect on the visions for lifelong learning they had for the year 2020. Slides can be found here.

Finally Peter Scotts visionary session on the grand challenges of TEL was a nice round-up of the winterschool, stating an outlook of the upcoming STELLAR project and its high integrative power of bundling joint efforts for the upcoming age of putting many visions for TEL into actual practice.

Other sessions were likewisely highly relevant and stimulating, a good way to find out about them is searching for the "tcws09" tag on slideshare (or click here).

On a personal note, one of the main strengths of the winterschool as before was also the good opportunities for networking, getting to talk to people that otherwise are scarcely available and meeting new players.

A critique of the winterschool could be that the schedule was very crammed and that the event altogether was a bit short. Considering that one working week is the maximum of what's realistically possible, a solution would be to extend the winterschool virtually, by having preparation meetings online and follow-up meetings likewisely. What worked always well for the Summerschools was for example the idea of forming clusters (small special interest groups) before the actual event takes place and having people work together on ideas throughout the event, while loosening up the schedule slightly at the same time. 

Finally there is Wolf's excellent video of the event, found here , as well as a great collection of photos on flickr.

Special thanks go to Dai Griffiths and Jon Dron for a fantastic musical experience. And of course to Milos and Christian for dealing flawlessly with the difficult task of organizing everything, making the Winterschool an exceptionally intense and mind-boggeling experience. As I like to say: "Thumbs up through the ceiling!"