Before Rendering

Local News "Gets Serious"

It was a pleasant surprise to see the local Bakersfield affiliate broadcast news department do a feature yesterday on the Education Arcarde at the E3 Expo underway in LA this week.

In this feature, they played an interview clip with one of the authors of "GOT GAME - How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever." It just so happened that this book was sitting in my lap when the broadcast occurred.

Serious Games gets a feature run at dinnertime.

Cool.

LA Times - Geek Fun Isn't Frivolous

The LA Times Opinion Section ran an article by Raph Koster. He is the chief creative officer of Sony Online Entertainment.

"It all rests on our learning to take games seriously. If we continue to consign them to the ghetto of frivolous playthings meant for children (fail to update our mental models, as it were), then we'll continue to see unreasoned fear in the headlines. If we, on the other hand, learn to see games as important, we'll open doors for both the medium and for society in general.

When you see the media blitz accompanying E3 this week, try to keep that in mind. It'll seem crude and loud and desperate for attention. But this is a medium in its infancy, just realizing its potential, and most babies tend to make a fuss. When games grow up, they'll help save the world."

I don't know about saving the world ... but, they're sure to change education as we knew it!

I'll be there this week, at the Education Arcade and the E3 Expo ... and it is sure to be exciting .... in a geeky kinda way.

Thanks to Kathy Dawson for the article link.

Get Serious at the League CIT in Dallas

If you can make it ... I'm presenting at the League CIT in Dallas Oct 23, 2005

I'm presenting in Session Track 1: Emerging and Future Educational Technology

"Each year, Track One focuses on an emerging technology believed to be of particular interest to educators. For the 2005 CIT, the special focus for Track One is Gaming and Simulations and Their Implications for Community Colleges. As increasing numbers of faculty members use games and simulations to support learning and more and more community colleges create gaming and simulations academic programs, what are the pros and cons educators should consider? Proposals targeted toward this focus area should encourage an exchange of ideas about how community colleges can anticipate and meet future educational, training, and organizational needs related to gaming and simulations."

My Presentation Title is: "Get Serious With Virtools to Create Simulations and Educational Video Games"

Here's a description: "Serious Games hold significant promise for today’s learners. In this forum, experience first-hand how Virtools is used in an Online Game Prototyping course where faculty and staff learn to create and distribute their own simulations and educational video games. Participate in case-study critiques of games that have been created in this course, and leave with a greater knowledge of how to proceed with serious game production at your own institution."

This is the presentation plan:

1. Demonstrate Virtools and the instructional media/lessons used to deliver the online course.

2. Preview the contents of the CD provided to each participant with sample lessons from this demonstration.

3. Visit the online course in session and experience the instruction first-hand.

4. Critique games produced by students in the course in a case-study discussion of the successes and challenges.

5. Question and Answer Wrap Up.

The Year of the Plague game

Here's a project that you might find exciting ...

In my online game design program the students are creating an educational video game called "The Year of the Plague". This is a PC based video game to played multiplayer in a PC lab or online multiplayer offsite.

The gameplay is: you start the game in the center of London in 1666. You must escape to the St. Giles area without catching the plague. In order to play, you must intensively study Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year".

Course delivery/curriculum activities for the game are being designed for single session small group (50 minutes) and also semester long "hero's journey" student team campaigns.

The prototype will be ready in August.

The subject matter expert is Dr. Corey Marvin, a Professor of English at Cerro Coso. His specialty is medieval literature.

We're looking for faculty that are interested in beta testing next Fall ...

Playing the Course

Playing the Course: Game Emergence and Online Learning Communities
By Jim Kiggens
California Virtual Campus, Professional Development Center

As educators in the online environment, we work to promote the development of virtual learning communities that will engage learners. But, ultimately it is the learners who determine whether a virtual learning community emerges.

In the arena of online multiplayer game design, developers endeavor to design games that will also promote the emergence of a virtual community. Game developers design to incorporate emergent properties in their games to enhance the user experience. Multiplayer online games facilitate chance encounters, collective recreational activities and spontaneous social interaction.

Emergent interaction varies the user experience depending upon group dynamics, therefore, prolonging social participation. In this way, emergence creates a game that is more engaging and the resulting virtual learning community engages the player to persist in playing the game on an ongoing basis.

Digital game based learning associations and initiatives are highlighting the new opportunity available to educators today in incorporating the intrinsically motivating environments of multiplayer online games to promote emergent virtual learning communities where the learner develops his or her own understanding through a social process of experience, practice and participation.

Game skills pay off in real life

RESEARCH FINDS BENEFITS OF VIDEO GAMES IN UNEXPECTED AREAS
By Mike Antonucci
Mercury News
May 10, 2005

At the Charles Schwab company's call-center headquarters in Phoenix, human resources vice president Chip Luman has learned a secret about financial services technology and the employees who operate it:

"Video-game players often display exceptional business skills."

``The people who play games are into technology, can handle more information, can synthesize more complex data, solve operational design problems, lead change and bring organizations through change,'' said Luman, 38.

Luman is among a host of professionals -- in fields including business, medicine and education -- who have noticed a surprising number of social benefits from the increasing time that Americans are spending with ``Super Mario,'' ``Rise of Nations'' and ``The Sims.''

Moreover, almost all the games they cite are mainstream hits from an industry that often is vilified as brainless and exploitative. Some of the games that have the most positive potential are either famously controversial or rated Mature because of violent or provocative content.

Does Education Evolve or Collapse?

The clarity of Seymour Papert’s vision was remarkable, and his analogy of the collapse of the former Soviet Union and impending collapse of the education system as we know it was striking. I completely agree with his opinion (in 1998) that our current method of education was/is not relevant for the learners and the societies that depend upon it.

But, I don’t believe that a total collapse will occur. I believe that we are already seeing today that the Millennial generation of learners is causing such a rapid evolution that education will be forced to evolve before that collapse could occur. This megachange in education is going to “just happen” much in the same way that the web “just happened”. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t administered or governed, it just happened.

I am completely convinced that the use of online multiplayer games for elearning will be the single most significant factor in this coming megachange, on a scale comparable to the advent of the web. The incoming generation of learners are game players. Online multiplayer games are the ideal environment for constructivism. The technology exists and it is already capable of “localizing” – allowing a global community of learners to participate with language being transparent. So, if you can situate learners into a social learning environment that is ideally suited and with which they are already familiar, and this environment can extend the learning environment to a truly global scale, and the technology required to do so is already being used by millions of users world-wide, how can it not be the future of learning?

What if you met someone that told you that they were teaching at the college level. And, in the course of the conversation they stated that they don’t use the web, they didn’t care for computers, and they felt that neither were appropriate in their classroom or curriculum? What would you say?

In one year, or two years, maybe three years downhill with a tailwind … not incorporating multiplayer gaming may be just as unthinkable.

What do you think?

Serious Games Help Stroke Victims

Video Games May Help Stroke Victims, by Jamie Stengle, AP writer.

Boring, tedious, and painful are all adjectives that I would use to describe physical therapy ... using game immersion to keep the patient engaged in the therapy is such a terrific idea!

Very, very cool.

Thanks to my OTL classmate Cynthia Taylor-Denes for this article link.

Scholar.Google.com

www.Scholar.Google.com

Totally cool.


"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."--Arthur C. Clarke