Twine as elearning?

Litpunk

Hey!
I'm new here, and have been poking around the archives, but couldn't find any examples of Twine being used as a teaching tool.  Like, the students get a scenario, and follow it through to the end.  And they learn something (math, chemistry, whatever). 
Has that been done with Twine?  Can anyone point me in the right direction to get started?
Thanks!
Garret

Sharpe

In my thread right below this one, Seeking Creative Input: "Quiz" Game for School, I talk about a game with the specific purpose of teaching vocabulary words. You're welcome to add your input.

mth

There is also this proof of concept by E. Turner.

dacharya64

Not specifically Twine-related, but this thread discusses this a bit: http://rpggeek.com/thread/1105740/if-in-the-classroom

youcancallmedavid

I'm a little surprised there isn't more here on elearning myself.

Cathy Moore's elearning blog has some great tips and examples- some of it twine specific, but most of it adaptable to twine.
Here's a good starting point: http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2011/07/sample-branching-scenario-cool-tool/

Have been playing with the concepts a bit- happy to discuss, share and bounce ideas around.

AntonMuerte

I'm speaking purely from personal experience and the mentality of the management and bean counters I've come up against recently.  I think a large part of it is down to having to learn a language that is largely text based (not point and click to do most of it with a flashy GUI) to create anything, and the fact that it's open-source.

As part of her job my wife has to deliver training occasionally.  Any of the 'online' resources and training tools are created specifically for her by an external contractor, and all she has to do is say whether it's correct or not.  Having said that, a lot of the stuff she teaches can't be actually be taught using a medium as such and requires face to face training, as well as training on the job so I may be using a poor example.

The open-source issue is multifaceted.

When it boils down to it companies seem to prefer paying for licensing costs and 'established' training as opposed to training their staff to use something that's free, but finding someone who is an expert is like finding fairy dust.  For instance while Twine is free, the documentation in the Wiki really needs some work, and while I am slowly picking it up and getting other skills such as CSS and Javascript refreshed, I still have to ask on here for clarification a fair bit.  If it boils down to having an established commercial solution with fairly accessible training vs a free solution that is hard to train people in then it makes economic sense for a company (which is what all education institutions are at the end of the day) to go with the commercial solution as it allows them to get the job done quicker and save on training costs in the long run.

Open-source also opens up another problem when it comes down to the issue of vulnerabilities.  Say a massive vulnerability such as the HeartBleed bug was discovered in Twine, the fact that my wife works in high secure and medium secure mental health facilities then the entire training suite that was created would have to be instantly pulled offline.  Yes, the fact it's open-source means that the techies could probably resolve it and deploy a fix fairly rapidly, but at the end of the day it's something that there's no redress for.  With commercial software there's usually some sort of agreement in place that covers any losses incurred by down time and deployment to fix vulnerabilities, not to mention the vendor will usually issue the fix.

There's finally the issue of what happens if the Twine creators suddenly decide to drop it.  While development would doubtlessly be continued by a few people at least, you end up with a lot of different forks, all of which could vary wildly.  What happens for support and any financial losses that may arise as a result.  This has been demonstrated by the dropping of XP.  The trust my wife works for has spent the past 4 years swapping all their systems across to Windows 7, but the problem came with some of the work laptops.  Staff have been happily using XP Pro on their machines for the past few years (my wife's laptop is actually quite old and, apart from a new screen, has worked quite happily with XP), and twice a month they take it into work and the automated system in place applies any fixes and updates relevant.  Now that XP has been officially dumped by Microsoft, all the laptops are having to be called in and if a laptop won't support Windows 7 then it means they have to be bought a new laptop.  The techies also don't like it now because they have to be aware of any zero-day vulnerabilities and then see how it impacts their systems.

I'm not saying that using Twine in an educational environment isn't a good idea, but it all boils down to the management learning to trust open source software.  I am actually an advocate of open-source software and most of what I use on my home machines is open-source, and in some cases just as capable as commercial solutions (compare OpenOffice to MS Office for instance).  As I'm writing this, the trust my wife works for is also negotiating contracts for who will supply their mobile phones.  The three main contenders are Blackberry, Apple (who are way out in front regarding it because the Blackberry support has been abysmal) and Microsoft.  One that keeps being raised time and time again is Android, but because of the 'open' nature of Android, combined with the fact that confidentiality and privacy is paramount, they won't touch it despite several advantages (and no - I'm not getting into an argument about which OS is the best lol).

Until the mindset of the management changes then it's going to be a long time before it's a common sight to see open-source software.