VW educators in the UK, look here

 Posted by (Visited 6204 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Oct 272009
 

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

RezEd podcast

 Posted by (Visited 5303 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Oct 212009
 

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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Bayer Didget – A Nintendo DS Blood Glucose Meter

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Jul 052009
 

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…

RezEd Podcast: Metaplace, Quest Atlantis

 Posted by (Visited 4372 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Jun 032009
 

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.

News games on the rise

 Posted by (Visited 6290 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
May 082009
 

Dan Terdiman has an article on the rapid proliferation of “news games,” which were an unusual and even controversial genre a few years ago when Ian Bogost and others started pushing them. Today, they are all over the place, thanks to the huge Flash community: tiny games that serve as a replacement for editorial cartoons (editorial cartooning, btw, is a business that is apparently in trouble).

When we talked five to ten years ago about how games were going to be the dominant medium of this century, I don’t think most people were thinking in terms of this sort of tiny minigame, mostly made by amateurs. And yet, I think that is kind of where we’re going.

It makes me ponder, what other areas of media will have little games slip in and replace the old way of doing things? We could maybe walk through the newspaper and see: how about classifieds? Obituaries? The social column? The letters column? Anyone got a Flash game to replace the Arts page?

Some choice quotes:

Doherty’s Fubra bought Sock and Awe from its original creator on eBay for more than $8,000, but said ads on the game earned the money back in just 48 hours. And Tocci said his creations earn money from royalties paid by the casual games sites that host the titles.

That leads to staggering numbers like the 14.5 million viruses tackled in Swinefighter and the 93.5 million shoes tossed at Bush in Sock and Awe alone. Tocci’s Double Bird Strike has been played more than 400,000 times.

“It’s a shame the innovation (of providing CDC advice about swine flu in Swinefighters) was left to two entrepreneurs,” said Doherty. “It would have been great if the World Health Organization had realized they could use a game to raise awareness about preventing swine flu.”

— ‘News games’ put public in charge of hot topics | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.

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