designers as learners:
igniting the spark for web-based roleplay

Position:

Designer/Maker &Senior Lecturer Custom Made Footwear

Organisation:

Douglas Mawson Institute of Technology, South Australia

Email:

simoomal@
dmi.tafe.sa.edu.au

In 2001 I was fortunate enough to experience online education role-play with some of the wonderful team involved in this Australian presentation. The inevitable was looking me in the face, the future of theoretical education will be online education, and the most enriching experience available to promote that education will be through role-play scenarios. It was a fantastic realisation,… “the future is here”.

The team played out the scenario over the designated period and I had the most enriching computer experience to date, that is… until I co-designed, moderated, and played my own role-play scenario, ‘Fashion House’, a fashion students’ communications module. Something wonderful did happen, we all learnt, and much more than we anticipated.

Designer as Learner

Intuitions are constructed from actions and outcomes, and these are grown from when we are babies onwards. The experiences we live provide the most enriching learning we can obtain. The role-play scenario provides a contained world in which we can experiment with new ideas and social behaviour without the permanent outcomes of the real world. My experiences in role-play participation were invaluable in enabling me to correct and fine-tune my designing of new learning scenarios. What works, what slows role-play down, what is too loose or too specific, how to spur people into using their imagination, etc.

I view the participation in online role-plays as an essential prerequisite to understanding how best to construct new role-play learning modules. “As you read a book you learn how the story unfolds, as you write a book you guide the reader through levels of understanding” (but the reader will always fill in the picture). By participating in role-plays I began to understand that these scenarios are a half-story and the remainder unfolds, as the participants exchange their input with each other. The designer must relinquish control and respond to the ever-changing directions where the participants want to take your story, and why not, it is their learning.

Current involvement with role-play

“From a solar flare to total eclipse”, is how I would best describe my status. The initial experiences and learning curve for my introduction to role-plays was exponential and grand. The discovery of this wonderful tool to enrich learners and help make the subject their own personal subject was clear and bold. The uptake of a completely new understanding of the classroom, with its notion of ‘learning can be fun’ and the idea that you can log in and out of the classroom, was too much head spin for established colleagues to take up. Like a classic episode of the Bold and the Beautiful just when things look their brightest and best some undercurrent prevents the beauty from truly blossoming. In my case, like many others, the notion of something so new was too confronting for the status quo. People would have to learn another new thing, people would have to put in effort, people would have to begin to understand learning in a new way. All of a sudden everybody was too busy, “but hey, it sure looks great”. It was a case of ‘where two worlds collide’ but should be ‘where two worlds meet’. To be fair it should also be understood that the infrastructure for fully developing and engaging in the online role-plays was not up to the task. It also occurred to me that the time needed to participate in the role-play module ‘Fashion House’ was far greater that the time required for the communications text module it would replace. So there you have it, more learning and understanding. Currently I continue to develop scenarios and guidelines but I still must wait for my opportunity to implement them into the student environment.