ReLIVE11 – Submission extension, reduced price!

June 17, 2011 — Daniel

Good news all round then… no formal dinner, but the cost saving is worth it. Less speeches, more chat I reckon:

Researching Learning in Immersive Virtual Environments 2011 (ReLIVE11)

Creative Solutions for New Futures, 21st – 22nd September 2011, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Reduced Fee! New Deadline!


In response to feedback from the enthusiastic but underfunded community, we have worked to reduce the conference fee, enabling more opportunities for attendance in a period when budgets for conferences are constrained. Although we are no longer providing a formal conference dinner and entertainment, we anticipate that this will provide more focus for academic collaboration and networking. This has enabled us to reduce the fee to £285 for early birds and £340 for later registrations. Consequently we are offering a new deadline for abstract submissions, and will be accepting these up to and including the 3rd of July.


We are pleased to remind you that there will be Best Paper awards at the conference, to the value of £300 in Springer books, sponsored by Springer. Publication opportunities include an ISBN registered conference proceedings (note that the ReLIVE08 Conference Proceedings are still regularly downloaded from the archive conference site), and an edited book of chapters developed from the top paper submissions, published in the new Springer Immersive Environments series (to be launched at the conference).


As a delegate to ReLIVE11 you will meet with other leading edge researchers from around the world to exchange ideas and scholarship. With an opening keynote from Robin Wight, founder of The Ideas Foundation and a creative legend in advertising, we challenge the community to think creatively and to look for opportunities to collaborate and innovate. The invited panel speakers from within and without academia bring a range of interesting perspectives and expertise to our discussions and we anticipate a showcase of papers and workshops that reflect the best of current academic research, making ReLIVE11 your one stop conference this year for disseminating, sharing and stimulating your practice in virtual worlds.


We are now seeking proposals for papers, workshops, symposia, posters and inworld events that demonstrate innovation within the themes of Concepts, Methods, and Implementations (In collaboration with JISC CETIS).


ReLIVE Virtual Festival, 20th September 2011 We are also pleased to offer a ReLIVE Virtual Festival. This will take place within Second Life and/or other immersive environments, and we invite innovative proposals for activities (see ‘Call for Papers’ section on the ReLIVE11 website for more details), particularly from and for those who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference. Registration for this one-day event will be free, but places are limited.


The Virtual World Conference, 14th September 2011 ReLIVE11 is linked to The Virtual World Conference, a 24 hour conference of invited speakers taking place within Second Life on the 14th of September. Please see www.thevirtualworldconference.org for more details.

Please visit our website for full details www.open.ac.uk/relive11

Best wishes

ReLIVE11 Conference Team

Posted in Call for Papers, Second Life, Virtual Worlds. No Comments »

Using Web 2.0 Tools to Develop and Support a Multi-Campus Class

June 12, 2011 — Daniel

I was at the JISC RSC Scotland SW Future Focus event on Friday. There were some great sessions during the day – Jane Hart gave the opening keynote, with a very motivational (and fun) afternoon keynote from Gavin Oates of Tree of Knowledge. In between I attended a couple of sessions related to games and 3D technologies in education: Dr Vassilis Charissis 3D training applications for surgeons and medics, and Keith Quinn’s demonstration of the use of the PSP Second Sight application to develop augmented distance learning training packs for Glasgow City Council. More details on these and other talks in the full programme.

The event closed off with an awards ceremony awarding prizes to some of the institutions and individuals who submitted case studies to “Best of the West” – a collection of examples of effective and innovative practice, to help share knowledge and expertise across the region.  There are about 50 of these, and they are well worth a browse – covering a wide range of tools and technologies across a range of disciplines in FE and HE. My own case study – Using Web 2.0 Tools to Develop and Support a Multi-Campus Class – has a bit of everything bar the kitchen sink, as I used a bunch of different resources and technologies to allow me to develop new materials for a multi-campus class with limited time. The class finished after writing up the case study, and I’m pleased that it received some of the most favourable feedback I’ve ever had from students. Re-writing the module as it was being taught was undeniably hard work – but the technologies and resources used both made it easier and made it better than it would have been otherwise.

On Friday I was extremely surprised to find out that my case study was one of six shortlisted in the Teaching and Learning category of the awards – and somewhat taken aback when I was awarded a Highly Commended prize. As you can see by the breadth of my smile here.

 

Posted in Assessment, Teaching, Technology. No Comments »

My OER 2011

June 8, 2011 — Daniel

I’ve not written much about Open Education Resources recently, but I have produced some over the last year.

While I was teaching 3D graphics, I produced a blog to collect some of my notes and materials – this might be of interest to C++ / OpenGL programmers out there: http://3dgamedev.wordpress.com/ (My notes on getting the OpenGL Superbible GLTools library to work with Visual Studio 2010 seem to be something of a hit, and some of the files I made available are regularly downloaded – so its of use to some people out there, which is nice).

I also took over a first year class in Computing Systems that needed substantial reworking. This had to meet a broad audience – with some of the students on programming focussed courses and others on more business oriented courses, I did not think that a traditional Computer Systems course was going to work. I needed something broader, but that allowed students to study individual topics in much greater depth according to their interests. So this was a complete re-write from ground up. With limited time, I turned to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for help, alongside textbooks and other OER online courses. The resultant Computing Systems lectures are available on Screencast, and you can download the lecture slides (for now at least) from box.net.

I should package these up, and upload to some repository… perhaps when I have the time…

Posted in Game Development. Tags: . No Comments »

A glut of books

June 6, 2011 — Daniel

As blogged, tweeted and posted elsewhere, the US National Academies Press, which publishes a wide range of books on science, engineering and medicine developed by leading academics has made its entire catalogue of 4000 odd books available in pdf format for free.

Stephen Downes’ first pick is Learning Science Through Computer Games and Simulation, while The Rise of Games and High Performance Computing for Modeling and Simulation looks more at the capabilities of games for scientific applications.

My own recommendation would be the expanded edition of How People Learn – which summarizes a wide variety research findings from across the learning sciences is a very straightforward way.

I’m looking forward to digging into this amazing resource, but perhaps I need to start with something that will help me deal with the sheer volume of knowledge now freely available? Something like Glut: Mastering Information Through The Ages perhaps? Although sadly this one doesn’t yet appear to be available for download.

Posted in Games Based Learning, Learning. No Comments »

Power of Distraction

June 6, 2011 — Daniel

A recent piece (US Unplugged) in the Times Higher collects quotes and stories from a number of institutions and individual tutors now discouraging the use of laptops in lectures and social networking on campus.

Some good quotes from Clifford Nass:

“It seemed as though they could actually do two things at once. What do these kids know that I don’t? It drove me crazy. That’s what inspired my research.”

But he found that “they’re not amazing. They can’t really do it.” His research shows that the students’ memories were disorganised; they fixated on irrelevant data, could not follow specific directions that required paying attention and wrote poorly.

… “We’ve reached a period where attention is no longer valued. There’s been a cultural change where we’ve forgotten about the idea of paying attention,” he says. “And people have started to resent that.”

I haven’t banned laptops from my own lectures – indeed, only small numbers of students bring laptops to lectures at UWS, so it hasn’t really been a major issue. In some classes I’ve given out laptops – but that has been to allow students to do practical work at set points in a class (its hard to teach programming in a lecture). I have this year used mobile phone based response/poll systems in class and that did work well – using the technology to concentrate attention on the task, without allowing it to become a distraction seems to be key.

Sherry Turkle makes a very worthwhile point:

But what professors are learning to say is: ‘You know what? In this class we’re here to be with each other. We’re here to be a community. Let’s make the most of it.’

There are of course two sides to this – lecturers need to do their part to engage students and to try to promote learning – and students need to learn how best to help themselves and understand the negative impacts of partial attention.

(See some of the other posts here on multi-tasking for links to other studies)

Posted in Attention, Learning, Multi-tasking, Twitch Speed. 2 Comments »
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