This arrived in my inbox today via the IGDA mailing list. Links to what looks like a nice set of short videos from a discussion on the potential of digital games in learning. Not had time to view them yet, so no comments.
Hello!
Thank you to everyone who attended the IGDA/Learn Play/Parsons event a few weeks ago in NYC:
What Can (and Can’t) Games Do?: The Potentials and Limits of Using Games for Learning
Michael Wesch (of ‘The Machine is us/ing us’ fame) has a new video on YouTube - produced in collaboration with his class - “A Vision of Students Today“. Many of the elements of todays vision, Facebook and laptops aside, are actually pretty similar to my own undergraduate days… students buying books they don’t read or skipping half the readings or not paying attention in class. The tech has changed, but the students largely seem the same.
Review of day 2 of the MoodleMoot conference in Milton Keynes below. Martin Langhoff reveals Moodle’s role on One Laptop Per Child; Paula de Waal on the hype and reality of Web 2.0 in the classroom; Daniela Rappitsch and an unusual scheme for marking coursework; and Ray Lawrence on effective Moodling.
And both my Sloodle presentation and Pieter van der Hijden’s one on Moodle and Gaming are now available on Blip.tv in the Learn4Life page. (Lots of other education and technology videos there too).
Today I had hoped to attend ECGBL 2007 in Paisley, just up the road from my office. Matters conspired to prevent that. I also hoped to complete the coverage of MoodleMoot - there was some great content on the second day, and some good chats too. But no time for that just now.
Instead, as an aside, just about time to note that the UK government’s attitude to the games industry appears to be as ambivalent as ever. During a panel discussion at the London Games Week, government minister Margaret Hodge told David Braben to “take your studio to Canada, then”. Even with her assertion that he’d be back in a few years, this seems a very odd statement for a government minister.
(David was the co-author of Elite back in the day… the first and, to-date, only game that had me rushing out to get it as soon as it became available.)
And I thought I was quite critical of Marc Prensky! Jamie McKenzie has previewed his keynote for the National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) at the end of November in San Diego. Read it here.
Posting this from the UK MoodleMoot.
Martin Dougiamas’ keynote, Steven Githens on Open Source mashups and Pieter van der Hijden on Moodle and Gaming/Simulation, all below.
When Orwell penned 1984, I don’t think he expected Big Brother to become a popular game-show, though a number of elements of his imagined dystopian future have come to pass - in particular the adoption of CCTV and surveillance technology. I think he would be surprised though by the extent to which people’s private details are voluntarily surrendered.
The Carnival of Math is a blog-hopping festival of math-related posts, with something for just about everyone. Its 18th outing launched last week, with a really amazing range of links. Whether its junior school, high school, college, recent research or even a recreational interest in maths and puzzles, there will be something there for you.
Meanwhile, just a few minutes ago I came across this strange (and very timely) omission in Word’s spell checker:
What I really don’t get is how can Word’s spell-checker accept ‘innumeracy’ yet not ‘numeracy’?
