Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games has partnered with the New York Times to create a series of gamevertorials (sic) for the Time’s OpEd page. In Food Import Folly, which appeared last week, you “Take the role of the FDA inspectors in a world of increasingly numerous food imports and increasingly unmanageable risk. Your charge: try to […]
Archive for May, 2007
A Taxonomy of Serious Games
Published May 29th, 2007 in Culture, Educational Technologies, Serious Games and Uncategorized. 2 CommentsAs noted by 360KID’s Scott Traylor in his blog Ben Sawyer presented a taxonomy of serious games at the recent Annenberg Workshop on Learning Games. Scott writes, “Ben began the presentation with a very fitting poem by John Godfrey Saxe about six blind men who went to see an elephant. Each blind man found a […]
Moodle Mashup
Published May 25th, 2007 in Educational Technologies, Emerging Technologies and Serious Games. 3 CommentsIf you combine the open source Moodle.org learning management system with lesson plans that use Linden Lab’s Second Life you get something like Sloodle.com, a vision of how to use virtual worlds in the classroom.
“Sloodle is a project to integrate the VLE platform Moodle with 3D immersive settings such as Second Life. Imagine a Moodle […]
Gamer-Centered Design
Published May 21st, 2007 in Culture, Educational Technologies, Serious Games, Uncategorized and User Experience. 5 CommentsI’ve championed user centered design for years and in part that’s behind the argument for using educational games and simulations for teaching: meeting and engaging students on their own terms. Now I’m seeing a gamer-centered design aesthetic begin to emerge in some surprising places, like business software, where you might least expect games to have […]
Bringing new meaning to the phrase global warming, Rafat Ali broke the story yesterday that Sony is in talks to acquire Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids from British Columbia. Sale price is rumored to be in the range of $450m, a 7.5 multiple of Club Penguin’s reported $60m sales. Though not the stuff […]
Easy Coding for Kids
Published May 16th, 2007 in Culture, Educational Technologies, Emerging Technologies, Serious Games, Uncategorized and User Experience. 3 CommentsScratch is a new programming language developed at the MIT Media Lab that’s aimed at kids from 8-up. According to the BBC story and video out earlier this week Scratch “does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages. Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building […]
IBM Leaves Second Life for Torque
Published May 15th, 2007 in Educational Technologies, Serious Games and Uncategorized. 3 CommentsIt’s no secret that IBM has been experimenting with Second Life and other virtual world platforms for some time. More recently the “desire to have a more secure intranet environment where we can meet and explore the potential technology and social implications” has prompted the addition of Garage Games’ low-cost Torque engine to their arsenal, […]
Joost Gets Juiced
Published May 10th, 2007 in Business & Finance, Culture, Educational Technologies, Emerging Technologies and Uncategorized. 0 CommentsJoost, the web video service created by Skype founders Jnus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom that I’ve blogged in these pages earlier in the year, has taken down a jumbo $45 million round of investment according to Rafat Ali’s PaidContent.org blog this morning. Although less than the $59.4 million raised by Brightcove, it’s still a […]
No Laptop per Child?
Published May 6th, 2007 in Culture, Educational Technologies, Emerging Technologies and Uncategorized. 0 CommentsThe growth of the One Laptop Per Child movement and the recent release of the “$100 laptop” has been a bright spot in educational technology. Or so it seemed. Then the New York Times front-page article Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops made me take pause.
On the surface, the Times reports that there have […]
Tools for Mapping the Metaverse
Published May 3rd, 2007 in Emerging Technologies, Project Management, Uncategorized, User Experience and Web 2.0 & Beyond. 0 CommentsSeveral months ago I began using MindJet’s MindManager to give form to some essentially stream-of-conciousness research and I was hooked immediately. Though I’ve hand-drawn or seen computer-generated mind maps for years, most recently in Ed Yourdon’s mind map of Web 2.0, adding another piece of software to my quiver was the last thing I wanted […]
Subscribe to RSS
Meet me at the 
