Tuesday 5 April 2005

Role play simulation papers

For those interested in the academic work of role play simulation, I have added a few papers to the site.

Creating Learning Opportunities Using an RPS Authoring Tool
To play the role of someone else requires both reflection and self-reflection - "how do I do this?" and "how does it seem to me that someone else does it?" are the two immediate questions upon which playing a role is based. The interplay between "how I would act" (given my own beliefs, knowledge, values, orientations, modes of action etc.) and "how someone else would act" (given what I know about their beliefs, knowledge etc.) throws into relief the reflective process underlying a RPS - a collaborative process of engagement in reflexive reflection.
The key to creating learning opportunities for the players in a RPS is to create a dynamic scenario that supports on-going and reflexive reflection congruent with the learning objectives the author aims to achieve. It is the transformation of the material to be learned into a communicative environment of problems and interactive information with which participants must actively engage. In the process they can make mistakes or indeed find useful strategies to resolve such problems or test the limits of existing strategies, beliefs, values etc., and their applicability in different contexts.

Predictive Power of Role-play Simulations in Political Science: Experience of an e-Learning tool
The paper argues that role-play simulations, viewed as collaborative thought experiments, enable analysts to examine scenarios that may not seem realistic at the time but which later prove otherwise. It provides examples that seem to predict future events and situations from 9 simulations run between 2000 and 2002, it raises questions about these results and attempts to provide a tentative explanation for them. The paper concludes by suggesting that only when relinquishing the quest for realism in the analysis of the political that one begins to catch a glimpse of political reality.

Where is the Teacher? e-Learning Technology, Authority and Authorship in Teaching and Learning
While most students (78%) who responded to the questionnaire either agreed or strongly agreed that the technology was instrumental in enabling them to be more interactive with peers as we expected, the majority (51%) either disagreed or strongly disagreed that it helped them relate to the teachers in their own time...

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