Blog Posts

Image by Michael Glass on Unsplash So, a couple of weeks ago I finished working for the Queensland Government. Most of my ten years within Government was spent working within the Department that provides Child Safety, Youth Justice and Community services, though I did do a stint in Health as well. Ten years is a long time so I thought I would take the time to reflect on my time within Government and some of the amazing people I met and things I did.

Image by Pexels on Pixabay on Unsplash I have been taking a number of digital media units as part of my University work because, as an IT person, public speaking and being more open is an area I am always trying to work on. This trimester I took a Social Media unit, looking at how social media, online communities and your online identity play a part in different fields.

Image by Alex Iby edited by Glenn Prince on Unsplash This blog is pretty new and, as my first ever post hints at, I’m starting to be more public with the work I do. University has been the catalyst for that change however it relates to a subject I have been reading and investigating for quite a while, personal branding. Personal branding is the image and representation of yourself, particularly in the online world (Michael Page, 2017).

Roughly five months ago I began this journey of being more social, and being more forthcoming with what I have learned and achieved over my years in IT. I am also a big fan of data and statistics. So as we near the end of this year, lets have a look to see if things have improved and where to from here. Image by felipe lopez on Unsplash What I started with We are starting this review with my very first post on this site in July 2018.

Image by rawpixel on Unsplash I had a marketing e-mail hit my Inbox the other day trying to sell me some courses that the sender offers around design, a profession normally associated with creative talent but requires a lot of experience in developing it as a skill. While this was not an overly uncommon occurrence what was interesting was part of their marketing spiel detailed the authors own learning journey (which mimics mine), which is essentially trying to figure it out for yourself, and how some people prefer more of a guided learning journey.

In first mock up post we came up with a concept for a gamified application and in the second mock up post we fleshed out most of the application. Let’s finish off this design with the last few components and draw out what these screens might look like. Image by felipe lopez on Unsplash We left off last time with a fairly well rounded final design for the application.

In my previous post we did a little bit of a brainstorming session with the Octalysis method to come up with a concept for a gamified application around using the Agile development methodology. Let’s continue with that design. Image by Pascal on Flickr (Public Domain) Squads and Soldiers We left off with having planned out a Mission Command Centre and linked the concepts of objectives, operations, missions and tasks to the relevant agile development concepts.

With everything currently going on at the moment I thought I would take a little bit of a break from the mock-up gamification design and post some musings around some work related subjects that have come up recently. Image by Quino Al on Unsplash My experience has been, when people think of architecture in an Information Technology sense, they think of complex, sometimes hard to interpret, diagrams and artefacts that look good on paper but take a long time to develop and are potentially harder to implement.

Image by Jaciel Melnik on Unsplash Using Octalysis My last post touched on the Octalysis method of categorizing the various gamification elements that can be applied to an application to motivate users. That post had a number of comments in regards to providing more detail and information about how this is, or could be, applied to applications. I think the points that you wrote in the blog were really interesting and I can't agree more on your opinion about the badge and leaderboard.

Image by The Creative Exchange on Unsplash The Octalysis Method Annalie, one of my fellow students in the gamification unit I’m doing, recently posted a Ted Talk by Yu-Kai Chou on Gamification to improve our world that is well worth a watch. In this talk, Yu-Kai breaks down his gamification design framework he calls Octalysis. Essentially, within Octalysis there are eight core drivers: