Are video games good for your health? – CNN.com. It’s one of those slideshow dealies. Among the anecdotes:
Always nice to see more of these studies…
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.
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.
Awesome! It goes into the cartridge slot for GBA games; too bad the new DSi doesn’t have that slot anymore.
Features
- Converts test results into reward points that children can use to unlock new levels and buy in-game items.
- Includes Knock ‘Em Downs™: World’s Fair video game and Mini Game Arcade for use with the Nintendo™ DS and Nintendo™ DS Lite gaming systems.
Bayer Didget – Product Information – Bayer’s DIDGET™ Blood Glucose Meter.
This is a UK website… dunno when or if it is coming to the States.
Someday I should finish and post up the game I did to teach my daughter about blood sugar levels and the glycemic index of various foods…
I’m on the MediaSnackers Rezed Podcast#33 today, for maybe five minutes worth of talk about Metaplace, particularly uses for education. The bulk of the podcast though, is about the fascinating project Quest Atlantis out of the Indiana University School of Education.
For example, after students have begun to learn about potential causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e. understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company). In making these decisions, students engage in projective consequentiality: they have to consider what their use of particular tools tells them about the context that they are working with. After making a recommendation, students travel 20 years forward in game time, and see the results of their recommendations (experiential consequentiality). At that point students are asked to reflect on the implications of their disciplinary recommendations on the context, thus serving to re-couple content with context.
