Byron Review on Internet and Gaming Risks

March 29, 2008 — Daniel

The Byron Review was published a couple of days ago. I would have blogged it at the time, but I’m busy…

You can get the report here: Safer Children in a Digital World: the report of the Byron Review

The report has been fairly well received by the media and the industry overall – if not welcomed in its entirety. What I found most interesting though was that the review comes not just in two the usual summary and full report versions, but a third version for children to read themselves is also available.

Safer Children in a Digital World

Posted in Gaming Addiction, Net Generation, Play. Tags: , , . No Comments »

Links for the day

March 26, 2008 — Daniel

One of those days… if I had another 6 hours, I still wouldn’t be done. So in brief, some links and very little comment:

INTUITION, SRI Virtual Worlds survey, The Myth of the Media Myth, and VLE vs PLE again again. More below.

(more…)

Posted in Communication, Education, Learning, Moodle, Second Life, Students, Teaching, Technology. Tags: , . No Comments »

The BBC Computer

March 25, 2008 — Daniel

The BBC news website has some pieces relating to the 1981 launch of the BBC home computer, which was designed and made by Acorn Computers. News article here about the meeting at the London Science Museum, organised by the Computer Conservation Society, and interview article here. The interview article relates one of my favourite stories from the time that an American visitor to Acorn didn’t quite know what to make of their computer networking system:

I remember Bill Gates marvelling at our networking because he didn’t know about networking at the time.

As an aside, this is an opportunity for me to ask if anyone has a 100K single-sided 40 track 5.25 inch disk drive and cable for the BBC model B going spare – while I still have my model B and a handful of disks, I loaned out the drive quite some time ago, and haven’t seen it since! I promise that if someone can find one for me that I will then spend at least 10 minutes playing Elite again, like it was originally intended.

Posted in Learning, Technology. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

Sloodle at ABSEL

March 25, 2008 — Daniel

Claire Condra gave a keynote at a recent ABSEL (The Association for Business Simulation and Experiential Learning) meeting, which includes a few mentions of Sloodle, and interview with Jeremy Kemp. You can catch the full presentation here (lots of audio, and lots of content – but spread across multiple pages for quick download times.)

Follow the ‘Learning Environments’ link if you want to skip to the Sloodle parts – or here if you just want to watch the intrepid reporter parachuting into a class!

Edit: You can also get more details on the event from The Seventh Sun, here.

Posted in Second Life, Sloodle. Tags: . No Comments »

Alan Kay at TED

March 20, 2008 — Daniel

If I hadn’t fallen behind again on my RSS feeds, I might have had this last week… but I just realised that TED happened again this year – a few weeks ago, and now the videos are all online. It’s easily possible to spend a day just watching the TED videos – and I can guarantee that it wont be a day wasted, with so many fantastic thinkers and do-ers gathered together and sharing their ideas. Homepage for this year’s event is here.

Meanwhile, I’ve finally caught up with Alan Kay’s presentation from last year!.

The presentation includes some brilliant demonstrations – and quite possibly should be required viewing for everyone involved in education… with simple demonstrations which show that its quite achievable to get 6 year old children to manage to work with differential equations! (Though perhaps without the jargon)

His talk features children’s use of simulation for experiments (with e-toys) and also touches on the OLPC laptop.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg_ToU7m1MI]

Posted in Communication, Education, Game Development Based Learning, Learning, OLPC, Technology, conferences. No Comments »

ThinknDrinkn

March 19, 2008 — Daniel

ThinknDrinkn is a game created by S1 pupils at two local Paisley schools to raise awareness of many of the issues around alcohol consumption. The game was created in collaboration with UWS (my institution) and a local games company, KodeTank. It was launched just the other day, and got some coverage on the BBC.

There is also a more detailed gameplay video on TeacherTube.

I took part in the first session in a game design brainstorming exercise – when the pupils met with health and police experts, with KodeTank and with ourselves. It was great to see all the ideas that came out of that first session – though the weight of my other commitments sadly kept me from staying involved in the project throughout.

Posted in Education, Game Development Based Learning, Games Based Learning. Tags: , . No Comments »

Before, beyond (and somewhere to the left of) Second Life

March 18, 2008 — Daniel

UPDATE: If you log in on the 18th at 11am GMT you should be able to join my (hopefully) live Google presentation by clicking THIS LINK. (Should allow you to ask questions using the chat interface!)

Later today (after I get some sleep!) I’ll be attending the Massively Multi Learner workshop at Anglia-Ruskin University.

I’ll be uploading my presentation in as many formats as possible to this post – and you may also be able to catch the live presentation online if you follow the instructions here.

(more…)

Posted in Education, Games Based Learning, Learning, Moodle, Second Life, Sloodle, Teaching, Technology. 2 Comments »

See me online at MML 2008

March 17, 2008 — Daniel

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at Massively Multi-Learner 2008. The presentations will be web-cast using Quicktime, details on the MML page here. My talk is titled “Before, Beyond (and Somewhere to the Left of) Second Life”, and will be a very brief run through of the use of virtual worlds in education (extremely simplified!) – looking at platforms past and future.

The presentation slides should also be online before too long – hopefully both in Google and Slideshare.

Then, in the afternoon, I’ll be demoing Sloodle with Peter… busy day.

Posted in Education, Second Life, Sloodle, conferences. Tags: , . No Comments »

Newtoon update

March 12, 2008 — Daniel

Newtoon update… (last mentioned here)

A video has been added to the page at Futurelab, so you can see Newtoon being used/played by students – and being discussed by the developers. I have to say that I’d still be more tempted to use Phun based on what can be seen here. Phun looks far more powerful, and based on open-ended play. Newtoon somewhat simpler, but can run on (some) phones and based around using the physics to create ‘micro-games’.

But you can download both if you want to compare – Newtoon from here.

(I wonder why Futurelab don’t also post their videos on YouTube… would allow me to embed it here at least!)

Posted in Game Development Based Learning, Games Based Learning, Physics, Teaching, Technology. Tags: , . No Comments »

How real are virtual worlds?

March 10, 2008 — Daniel

I’ve posted my lecture from today onto Slideshare – the topic was ‘How real are virtual worlds’? The obvious answer is that they aren’t real in the slightest, except of course that they touch heavily on real lives. (This is by no means a new observation of course… I mention a few books which you could refer to for more depth in the short short slideshow)

[slideshare id=300952&doc=how-real-are-virtual-worlds-1205186870691693-5&w=425]

It’s also available at GoogleDocs here (where the links work) , though I hope to add audio to SlideShare soon.

One major theme of the lecture was to highlight that real life entering virtual worlds is really just an extension of the way that the internet has entered real life. Much as we can trade, chat or even meet loved ones on the internet, so the same can happen in 3D virtual worlds – despite some media coverage its less of a new phenomenon than it may seem (at least in some of the ways in which it affects the lives of those who use it). Internet addiction and cybersex were features of news reports years before World of Warcraft or Second Life…

Posted in Communication, Second Life, Technology. Tags: , , . 7 Comments »
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