Games, Life, Education

The video from Web 2.0 Summit 2007 featuring Jane McGonigal explains a connection between life and games that has eluded me until now. The passion we have or can have for games and the ways these passions do not appear in our everyday lives is potentially explainable. Some of the reasons include special powers and gadgets (fly, teleport, speed up time), clear goals (save the princess, destroy the enemy, build a rollercoaster park), obvious paths to attain those goals (gather treasure, acquire powerful attack skills, follow arrows), meaningful feedback (life force, sound effects, scores), support structures (novice settings, cheat books, other players), audience and community (common narrative, multi-player, competitions). 

To connect all these same ideas to education doesn't feel like much of a stretch. Courses need to have clear goals (outcomes and objectives) - so often these are clear only to the institution and instructor. Courses need to have obvious paths to attain those goals, with intense amounts of feedback along the way. Students need an audience and common narrative and support structure to succeed. In many ways these ideas are built into institutions and in many ways they are missing the mark. We surely have tutors, but knowing when tutoring is necessary is difficult for many students. 

Game rhetoric, I believe, is an interesting tool to help understand how to improve our courses and student success. For a game to be successful it has to sell many copies, and for that to happen, many players need to want to succeed.

Distance Learning Retreat - Edutainment

The Distance Learning Department had our retreat today and I shared a little presentation on Edutainment. It's a huge, gigantic topic that really excites me. If anyone is using games or other interesting -- seemingly entertaining -- activities in their classes, I'd love to learn more about it. Collaborative web 2.0 sites are also included in this presentation as I tend to include them in the entertaining/social atmosphere of education.

The links won't actually work from this embedded powerpoint, but you can download the ppt file if you like. Or you can visit my diigo page where all of these sites will be listed, and more as I find them (filter on "edutainment").

Google browser and apps

While refreshing the Google Blog this morning in anxious anticipation of the Google Chrome web browser, I find myself doubly excited with the announcement of Google Video sharing:

You can learn more about video sharing and other innovative collaboration apps for businesses at www.google.com/apps/collaboration. And stay tuned for info about Google Video for schools and universities. It'll be available as part of Google Apps Education Edition on September 8.

Sounds good to me! I'm putting this on my calendar!

Slides in Blogger

I was asked recently if there was a way to include a slideshow of images in Blogger. I wasn't aware of any built-in mechanism, but they are always adding features and that one seemed like a no-brainer. As it turns out, there is a sort of built-in feature. Picasa, Google's image storage/sharing site collects all the images you load to your blog. Logging into Picasa gives you features to create public albums and load more photos. These albums can then be embedded back on your blog with a quick copy-paste.

Periodic Table of Videos

A brilliant application of YouTube in education. Professor Martyn Poliakoff is a gracious and fascinating host - full of wit, charm, brilliance and a massive amount of hair. I envy it all, but especially the hair.

Codetch

This isn't quite the app I was looking for, but it might help some with web page creation. If you are a Firefox user already, this add-on makes it possible to create web pages from within the Firefox environment - kind of. It actually opens as if a whole new program, but it's launched from within Firefox.

Combine this with a WebDAV folder into your CE6 course site and you have a powerful way to edit your existing course pages. (That reminds me I was going to post on how to set up a WebDAV folder to your course).

The app I'm REALLY looking for will cleanly and easily convert from Word into a nice looking and legit web page. Something without all the extraneous Word styles that are normally included and create problems for the internal CE6 HTML creator.

Gaming

I think it's time we start something like this at Kirkwood. Clickers are okay, but I'd rather get wii consoles into classrooms!

Simpsonized Dean

I know, it doesn't quite look like Todd, but it's just about as good as I could get with the tools available on the Simpsonize Me site. A nice example of what Flash is capable of producing.



UPDATE: Here is the real photo and then the clip-arty one I created.

FLVS - Keynote Speaker

Florida Virtual Schools is a remarkable system for many reasons. They boast incredible success rates that I believe can be attributed to their intense instructor training and communicative requirements. I haven't actually seen one of their courses, but I imagine they are pretty. They are a public online high school. Some of their rigorous requirements for instructors include student quotas (students must pass their classes) and mandatory phone calls to students. Communication is essential.

A few book recommendations from Lisa Gully:

* Prisoners of Time
* Who Moved My Cheese
* Raving Fans
* Creating Customer Evangelists

IDLA/IACON Pre-Conference

Attended some of the pre-conference for IACON/IDLA. Covered was Web 2.0 and Second Life. Coverage was somewhat basic, but some attendees seemed to be learning new things. There were a few spots in Second Life and a few people in Second Life that were interesting to see. Bowling Green University has an interesting build. And the concept of allowing students to work on projects in-world is exciting -- I'd like to see more of this.