SL Education Workshop - proceedings at last!

The post proceedings from the Second Life Education workshop, held back in August, are now available online. Edited by my good self and Jeremy Kemp, featuring:

• Foreword from John Bransford & Drue Gawel, University of Washington. John is a leading educational psychologist, the Director of multi-institution Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) centre, a member of the National Academy of Science and has co-chaired a number of NAS committees. It is a small contribution, but one we are very happy to have!
• Preface and Getting Started in SL by John Lester aka Pathfinder Linden. Another great addition to the proceedings.
• Keynote from Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. You can listen to his keynote here.
• Extendend and enlarged papers from the workshop itself. Go get the proceedings now to read all about it, so I don’t have to write all about it again!

Cheers.

What do children think about games-based learning?

Newsround, the BBC’s television news program for children ran a piece on educational games waaaaay back in August 2004. They also asked children from around the UK whether or not they would consider buying educational games. You can read an interesting selection of answers and comments here.

This was another link my wife sent me, which really should have been in the last blog entry. Just incase the page should disappear, a couple of choice comments below.

So much out there… thank goodness there’s two of me!

Its nice to have common interests with your partner. My other (better) half found a number of links which she passed on to me in the past few days… and only now do I have time to list them.

Covering Steve Johnson writing about Spore, how to motivate yourself and most importantly sharks with frickin’ lasers on their heads.

Engaging students with MMO

Bit late here, but Lisa Galarneau at Terra Nova has a long post on positive outcomes from playing MMO’s, beginning with a nice story of how one teacher has used World of Warcraft to engage with students, and to encourage withdrawn students to engage with one another. Lots of discussion too. I like Lisa’s writing and while the article focuses on the positive side, Lisa herself points (in one of the comments) to the recent South Park episode as a reminder that the outcomes from playing MMO’s aren’t always or uniformly the positive ones we like!

Its been a busy week…

More demographics…

According to a recent survey, the average US gamer is a little older than expected:

Contrary to popular belief that gamers are primarily teenage boys, results of the study indicate that video games have much broader appeal. On average, gamers are 41 years of age with an average annual income of $55,000. Further, females account for 52 percent of the gaming audience. The average gamer has been online for nine years and 84 percent have broadband access at home.

Learning with games, learning making games

After a few hiccups, the special issue of ITALICS that I’ve been guest editing is now available. The announcement which Joanne Marsh of the HEA posted is below:

Dear Colleagues,

ITALICS Volume 5 Issue 3 Learning with games, learning by making games is now available from the following url.
http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/italics/vol5iss3.htm

Daniel Livingstone (University of Paisley) is the guest editor of this issue which focuses on learning with games. The issue includes 5 papers which consider digital games-based learning, teaching game development, game development in teaching.

The 5 papers included in this issue are:-

Innovations in learning and teaching approaches using gaming technologies - can “The Movies” teach how to make a movie?
Ryan Flynn and Nigel Newbutt, University of Greenwich

A crisis in physics education : games to the rescue!
Colin B. Price, University of Worcester

Introducing game development into the computing curriculum - a progressive methodology
Colin B. Price, John Colvin and Warren Wright, University of Worcester

Providing the skills required for innovative mobile game development using industry / academic partnerships
Reuben Edwards and Paul Coulton, Lancaster University

Using a virtual world for transferable skills in gaming education
M. Hobbs, E. Brown and M. Gordon, Anglia Ruskin University

Another batch of reading…

From the Australian Computers in Education Conference, there was a special session on Games in Learning and Games Programming. The page has all the abstracts from the session, and I think you can get most/all of the papers themselves via this page. Thanks to Tony Forster for the link.

I’ll never catch up at this rate.

NMC Second Life Symposium

This month, starting October 10th, NMC will host a 12-day symposium on the NMC Campus in Second Life focusing on the impact of digital media. No programme as yet, Howard Rheingold (of SmartMobs fame) is one of the confirmed speakers. More on the NMC SL blog.

Scroll down a bit, and they also have a review of the John Bransford talk that happened a few days ago, including a couple of good quotes.

Twitch Speed, part 2 (for real)

Now onto the second part (for real this time) of my look at the ‘98 ‘Twitch Speed’ article by Marc Prensky. This time I’m looking at the Payoff vs. Patience section (page 5).

One way in which I may misread Prensky is the degree to which he is describing the differences (as he sees them) between “natives” and “immigrants”, versus celebrating them. I usually read his stuff as mainly the latter - and I think this is his take, that the changes are almost uniformly for the better. Am I misreading Prensky? I don’t think so, but I’d be happy to hear otherwise. But onto the review…

Two links… and two quotes

Two links today. A short video on games-based learning from Orange County Department of Education, and a report on the same from ELSPA.

My thoughts?