Raph Koster

Virtual Goods presentations
October 30, 2009 Game talk
4 Comments

Slideshows from the Virtual Goods Summit are starting to pop up, and here two that I found so far:

Virtual Goods: Why & How They Work by Amy Jo Kim, all about them motivations behind virtual goods purchases.

Virtual Goods: Why & How They Work

View more presentations from amyjokim.

A nicely detailed deck by William Grosso of LiveGamer on Managing a Virtual Economy that has plenty of concrete advice.

Managing a Virtual Economy

View more presentations from William Grosso.

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CNN on how games are healthy
October 27, 2009 Game talk
Are video games good for your health? – CNN.com. It’s one of those slideshow dealies. Among the anecdotes:
- Playing games can cure “lazy eye” better than an eye patch
- Training with Wii Fit and Wii Sports improved balance in Parkinson’s patients
Always nice to see more of these studies…
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VW educators in the UK, look here
October 27, 2009 Game talk
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Virtual World Watch has a request for information up — they want to hear from you about how you use virtual worlds in UK higher and further education.
The question

How are you using virtual worlds (e.g. Second Life, OpenSim, Metaplace, OLIVE, Active Worlds, Playstation Home, Blue Mars, Twinity, Wonderland) in teaching, learning or research?

Things you may want to include:

Why you are using a virtual world.

If teaching using a virtual world, how it fits into your curriculum.

Any evaluation of the experience of using the virtual world.

Will you do it again next year? Why (or why not)?

A few side points

Do you know of any other individual, group or project at your institution using virtual worlds for teaching, learning or research? If so, a contact detail would be appreciated.

Do you have any interesting screenshots of what you’ve been doing in virtual worlds? If so, then please consider submitting them to the Virtual World use in UK Education Flickr group – thanks.

— Snapshot survey #7 of virtual world use in UK Higher and Further Education.
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Cory Doctorow live in Metaplace at 6am!
October 27, 2009October 27, 2009 Game talk, Misc, Reading
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He’ll be taking audience questions, as well as answering some of ours. 🙂 Visit by following this link, or if you’re on my site reading this, just click on the embed below:

(event over, but here’s the log!)

Today we had Cory Doctorow in Metaplace, and he was a fascinating speaker! We had way too many audience questions than we had time for, and could have probably went all day long. Read on for the full chat log!

Cuppycake: As many of you are aware, Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and blogger at BoingBoing.net. He’s known for his activism on DRM and copyright, and for providing his books for free on the web through Creative Commons licensing.
Cuppycake: We’re excited to have him in Metaplace today!
Cuppycake: Hi Cory 🙂
doctorow: Hi there!
Cuppycake: First question
Cuppycake: You are a huge proponent of giving away electronic forms of your books. Can you talk about why?

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Read More Cory Doctorow live in Metaplace at 6am!
RezEd podcast
October 21, 2009 Game talk

I was lucky enough to be part of a podcast for Global Kids’ Digital Media Initiative, the RezEd podcast, alongside Daniel Livingstone and Joe Castille, who are two of the educators using Metaplace. It was a great conversation! Check it out here.

RezEd Podcast Episode 42 – Metaplace and Forecasting the Future of Virtual Worlds

(WORLD) The forty-second RezEd monthly podcast, produced by Global Kids.

Raph Koster, President of Metaplace, and two practitioners discuss the advantages of using Metaplace within the classroom, and an In Focus with Nic Mitham of KZero, discussing their new chart forecasting the future of virtual worlds.

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