Saylor.org are building a library of high-quality free online texts for a wide range of university courses. These all follow US based curricula outlines, but of course most will be equally useful anywhere in the world. The courses are arranged and grouped according to degree subject areas. So, for example, substantial progress has been made towards a complete set of texts for Computer Science degree level education.

There is also a current text-book writing competition, the Open Textbook Challenge, with prizes of $20,000 for accepted texts – and a number of job vacancies. I’d be very tempted to apply other than the requirement to attend monthly meetings in Washington D.C. (a big commute from Scotland!)

Of course, software development (including game development) is already part of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence – but the greater challenge comes with developing teacher skills and knowledge and getting the technology in place to support the curriculum. According the Ian Livingstone interview on Today, only 3 of 28,000 qualifying teachers in England in 2010 had Computing Science degrees (seems a dubious statistic myself, not sure what the origin of the stat is), so there will be significant need to support and develop teacher expertise. If schools are merely given the option of including programming, then relatively few may benefit from what has been announced as a very major shake-up.

I’ll leave final words to Prof Steve Furber (who as one of the creators of the BBC Computer, was responsible for the introducing many British school children to programming in schools):

“We look forward to hearing more about how the government intends to support non-specialist teachers who make up the majority of the workforce in delivering an excellent ICT education without official guidance on lesson content,”

• try to improve public schools (state schools, in UK terms)
• do something different

‘Do something different’ includes the likes of charter schools in the US or ‘free schools’ in the UK, voucher schemes and home-schooling. Fundamentally, what these all have in common is reducing support for public schooling and taking away from efforts to improve publicly funded schooling for all. I have no objection to someone withdrawing their children from public schooling and sending them through a suitably accredited/inspected/approved school as an alternative – as long as they pay for it themselves. The funds raised by government shouldn’t be diverted from public schools. Any shift of funding is effectively government support for disintegrating and dismembering the public school system.

By these terms, the current UK government’s policy (does not apply in Scotland, thank goodness!) is clearly going to be harmful to the public school system (via BBC):

“…parents very dissatisfied with their state school can opt out and set up their own school.”

“But there are two reasons why free schools are unlikely to be the best answer to this. First, there are very significant set-up costs, both in time and energy from the founders, but also in the straightforward sense of acquiring premises.

“While currently these are being generously funded by the government, this cannot continue if the policy matures and spreads.”

Money and time are spent on creating new schools where there are schools already. A public school with poor-to-middling performance sees a number of its students disappear, perhaps the better performing students with the pushier parents. With fewer students there will be less funding – and probably an even higher proportion of problem/disadvantaged students than before. Things are not looking good for the public school. The free school presumably benefits (at least initially) from much higher levels of parental involvement and the additional government funds. Involvement and funding that could have been used to improve the existing school instead.

Frankly, this is ideologically driven nonsense.

In all of this, the push from the government to shift schools from public schools funded through their local authority to directly funded academies is even more ridiculous. Michael Gove recently used extremely inflammatory language, claiming that critics of the academies program are “happy with failure“. This is clearly offensive when some of those critics are parents who don’t want very disruptive changes imposed on the schools their children go to without very good reason.

Indeed, like charter schools in the US, the evidence on whether academies improve schooling in the UK is very far from clear cut – as this helpful fact check summary from Channel 4 shows. (See the recent report from Mathematica Policy Research for more on the impact of charter schools in the US).

In reality, the really significant difference between ‘normal’ schools and academies are that

• academies have a little more power over selecting students (regular schools have to take everyone)
• academies will be able to buy services on the open market, rather than through shared use of services provided (or procured) by local councils

It seems to me that it is the second of these differences that is really driving the government here: while schools will remain publicly funded, they will increasingly be managed, maintained and supported by private companies making profit whether or not individual schools flourish or falter.

Charter schools, free schools and academies all play on parents’ natural desire to get the best possible education for their own children, while ensuring that many more children are deprived of the best possible.

http://www.virtual-worlds.net/vw2012/

Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce and call for papers for the Third International Conference on Virtual Worlds (VW’2012) which will be held from July 3 to 5, 2012 in Paris (La Défense).

Background

A Virtual World can be defined as a computer-simulated environment with its own physical and biological laws, populated by dynamic interacting entities such as artificial creatures and human avatars. Whereas Virtual Reality largely focuses on the design of 3D immersive spaces, and Artificial Life on the modeling and study of life-like systems, Virtual Worlds embrace both dimensions by synthesizing an entire digital universe. Their design and realization requires competency in various fields from Virtual Reality and Physics to Artificial Life and Ecology, Computer Graphics, High Performance Computing, and more.

Virtual Worlds have many applications in 3D simulation, computer games and online business. However, the approach is still broader and more fundamental. It also addresses the crucial problem of elucidating the constitutive principles by which large numbers of interacting elements can self-organize and produce emergent phenomena as they are observed in the natural world. Therefore the study of Virtual Worlds is particularly concerned with the formal basis of synthetic universes and offers a promising new way to contribute to the understanding of Nature and of complex systems in general.

Subjects

Topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:

Virtual World applications

-           Video games and entertainment

-           Educational, medical and business solutions

-           Virtual economies

-           Social and philosophical implications

-           Virtual Worlds and Ecology

Virtual World technologies

-           High performance and low latency solutions

Virtual and Augmented Reality

-           “Avatarization”

-           Human-machine interfaces

Virtual World fundamentals

-           Artificial physics and chemistries

-           Complex systems, emergence, self-organization

Artificial Life

-           Artificial life and ecosystems

-           Evolution, co-evolution and adaptation

-           Collective intelligence, cooperation, communication

Artificial creatures

-           Avatars

-           Virtual creatures

-           Intelligent agents

-           Conversational agents

Submissions

The Program Committee of VW’2012 is looking forward to high quality papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research.

Full papers may be submitted electronically from 16 October 2011 to 16 January 2012 via the conference website.

All submitted work will be assigned for double blind peer review. Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the conference and present their work.

Papers must be submitted in LNCS format and be up to 10 pages in length including abstract, figures and references. Formatting instructions are available at :  http://www.springer.com/lncs

Short papers (4 pages including abstract, figures and references) can also be submitted and selected ones will be presented as posters during demos session.

Artistic and technical demos are also welcome and can be submitted by contacting alainlioret@gmail.com before 12 December 2011.

Final demos has to be set up before 05 May 2012.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:               16 January 2012

Notification of acceptance :                05 March 2012

Early registration before :                   15 March 2012

Final paper deadline:                          05 April 2012

Conference days :                              03 July to 05 July 2012

Demos and Posters

Short Paper submission deadline:     16 January 2012

Notification of acceptance :                05 March 2012

Early registration before :                   15 March 2012

Final poster and demo deadline:        05 April 2012

We look forward to welcoming you at the conference!

Steering Committee

- Alain Lioret,  Université Paris 8 (Chairman)

Contact : alainlioret@gmail.com

- Jean-Claude Heudin , Institut International du Multimédia (Co-chairman)

Contact : jean-claude.heudin@devinci.fr

- Stefan Bornhofen, EISTI (Co-chairman)

Contact : sb@eisti.fr

- Jean-Claude Torrel, Institut International du Multimédia (Co-chairman)

Contact : jean-claude.torrel@devinci.fr

Provisional Program Committee

Bruce Damer, DigitalSpace, USA

Jeffrey Ventrella, CDM, Vancouver, Canada

Sébastien Barot, Bioemco,  France

Evelyne Lutton, INRIA, France

Emmanuel Cayla, ESTP, France

Kevin Korb, Monash, Australia

Marc Métivier, Univ. Paris Descartes, France

Tom Barbalet, BIOTA, USA

Frederic Fol Leymarie , University of London, GB

Pierre Berger, Paris ACM Siggraph, France

Penousal Machado, University of Coimbra, Portugal

Jon Mc Cormack, Monash, Australia

Maciej Komosinski, Poznan University, Poland

Mathew Lewis, Ohio State University, USA

Robyn Taylor, Alberta, Canada

Simon Richir, Ensam Angers, France

Marc Ebner, Univ. Tübingen, Germany

Gerald de Jong, Darwin @Home, USA

Joseph Nechvatal,  BIOTA, France

Alan Dorin, Monash, Australia

Daniel Thalmann, EPFL, Suisse

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Miralab, Suisse

Tatsuo Unemi, Tokyo, Japan

Leonel Moura, Portugal

Joseph Nechvatal, School of Visual Arts, USA

**Please Twit, share, post, or 1+ the following to help me promote virtual world language learning. Thank you so much! On with the show!**

I will be presenting at a fairly major international online conference next week and thought I would pass on this information to you. Many of you are aware I have been researching ways to use virtual worlds like Second Life for language learning. In the past few years I have grown my community, Cypris Chat (http://cyprischat.org), to over 500 active members from more than 40 countries. The conference I will be presenting at is focused on global awareness and education. I think it will be very exciting to show how a community like Cypris Chat has brought the world together with one main goal in mind, to learn or teach English. I hope this presentation will help promote this fantastic medium for educating students.

WHEN: Tuesday, November 15^th from 10:00pm to 11:00pm JST – 1:00pm – 2:00pm GMT

WHERE: Blackboard Collaborate link will be provided here on the 15^th: http://globaleducation.ning.com/page/globaledcon11-schedule-gmt-9-1 Please find my presentation in your time zone (Cypris Chat) I will be on Facebook during the presentation. Cypris Chat members can help you on our Facebook group page and chat channel here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/58820483559/

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

The 2011 Global Education Conference will be held November 14 – 18, online and free. Sessions will take place in multiple time zones and multiple languages over the five days. The 2010 Global Education Conference had 15,028 unique logins and presentations from 62 countries.

To be kept informed of the latest conference news and updates, please join this network. The sessions schedule is now live and available in multiple time zones HERE.

http://globaleducation.ning.com (Notice the featured discussions. Mine is featured…wow)

Over 5,000 registered attendees. Hundreds of presenters over five days. 19 keynote speakers.

The conference sessions are being held in Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate), and can be accessed live from any personal computer. (All sessions will also be recorded and posted quickly after the conference.) All sessions are free to attend, and the links to the sessions will go live in the schedule when the conference starts.

To check that your computer is ready for Blackboard Collaborate, please click here. “Step 1″ will indicate if you have a version of Java that is compatible, and then “Step 2″ lets you actually go into a test session. We encourage you to do this in advance of the conference. If you have any difficulties, you can ask for help in the WeCollaborate.com user community.

MY (rough) PRESENTATION PROPOSAL

Session Title: Cypris Chat – Virtual World English Learning Community in Second Life

Session Strand (use the “tag”): 2011Teachers

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Your Name and Title: Mike McKay / Professor Merryman – Adjunct English Professor

Your Library, School, or Organization Name: Mukogawa Women’s University

Name(s) of Co-Presenter(s):

Session Description: Cypris Chat is a not-for-profit English learning community based in the virtual world of Second Life (http://secondlife.com). Visit my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/SLmerryman) to see videos which describe the community in detail. We have over 500 active members from more than 40 countries. The purpose of our community is to show how virtual worlds can make language learning immersive and real. We provide an environment which is friendly, safe, anonymous and interactive making it the perfect environment for experimenting with the language. Friendships and relationships have developed that will last a lifetime which shows that such a concept changes lives. This community certainly proves that global communication can be helped through the use of technology. Come learn more about what we do and why we do it.

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Japan

Your Bio: Mike McKay (aka Professor Merryman) is an adjunct professor of English at Mukogawa Women’s university in Nishinomiya, Japan. He is an American expat and holds a Master of Education with an emphasis in Technology. His research is focused on providing his students with more realistic opportunities for learning and practicing English. Technology has proven to be the best medium for him based on the fact that living in another English speaking country is simply not feasible. He hopes to bring the world to Japan and provide learners of all ages, young and old, with a place to learn, explore, live and enjoy in English. The results of his research could be applied to all languages. His presentation is meant to share his experiences and what one could do to begin learning about this wonderful teaching medium.

Link to GlobalEdCon11 Session Proposal (full URL with http://): http://globaleducation.ning.com/forum/topics/cypris-chat-virtual-world-english-learning-community-in-second

Target Audience: Educators, Educational Technologists, Teachers, Parents, Secondary+ Students, Language Learners

The important dates are:

• Paper submission: 30th September 2011
• Notification of acceptance: 14th October 2011
• Final paper submission: 28th October 2011
• Summit: 28th-29th November 2011

Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Blended/Hybrid learning
• Personalised learning
• Intelligent agents in learning
• Edutainment & Game-Based Learning
• Location-based and contextual learning
• Immersive Educational technology markets & challenges
• Virtual and mixed-reality for education
• Educational software/hardware
• Intelligent classroom
• Virtual laboratories and tools
• Pedagogy for the Internet Age
• Innovations in the teaching laboratory
• Student assessment in high-tech teaching environments
• Cultural dimensions of educational technology
• Educational technology innovations
• Social/Collaborative learning
• Smart educational environment
• Teaching strategies to maximise benefits of emerging technology
• Future research issues for Immersive Education

More details on the call for papers page.

During gameplay, students naturally produce rich sequences of actions while performing complex tasks, drawing on a variety of competencies. Evidence needed to assess the competencies is thus provided by the players’ interactions with the game itself (i.e., the processes of play), which can be contrasted with the end product(s) of an activity—the norm in educational environments.

This presentation will describe the design and development of evidence-based assessments (embedded in a game) to measure 21st Century competencies. When embedded assessments are so seamlessly woven into the fabric of the learning environment that they’re invisible, called ‘stealth assessment’ (Shute, 2011; Shute, Ventura, Bauer, & Zapata-Rivera, 2009). Stealth assessments within games provide a way to monitor a player’s current level on valued competencies. That information can then be used as the basis for support, such as adjusting the difficulty level of challenges or providing timely feedback. One to two examples of the approach will be provided, time permitting.

Audience members are encouraged to participate and contribute.

More details, including link to local times for your time zone from the Transforming Assessment site: http://www.transformingassessment.com/

As far as releasing my own resources, over the past few years I’ve increasingly been posting Creative Commons licensed images and documents to Flickr, Scribd and Slideshare – though these are often related more to my research & development work than my teaching. This year I finally took some steps towards sharing my teaching resources with the wider public.

My 3D graphics classes rely heavily on copyright material from books written by others – which makes it a challenge to share what I’ve been doing. This last year, however, I started a blog  on 3d game development where I could post some of my own additional lab and lecture materials. The very first post on Getting Started with GLTools details how to install the required software. I included notes on getting the libraries to work with the latest version of Visual Studio in an embedded Scribd document – which has now been viewed over 6,000 times, while the linked zip files have been downloaded over 1,000 times. I had around 50 students in my graphics classes, so I’ve been able to reach 20 to 100 times as many people as I actually taught – simply by placing some of my materials online. I didn’t post the notes to a repository, in the vague hope that another tutor might find the materials and think them useful. Instead, I simply posted the materials online in the form most convenient to me and let other students, tutors, professionals, or whoever, find them however they might.

In the second semester I took over a first year Computing Systems class – this was a bit of a challenge as it required a substantial rewrite as the class had to be applicable to a much wider audience than previously. I wanted to provide much greater context and to make the material much more approachable and up to date. I looked to Jorum and existing text-books, but generally the available materials were aimed squarely at Computer Science and Engineering students – too much depth, not enough context – and it would have been a major task to revise the material to suit. Instead I opted to pick a very general book that had broad coverage of material and provide additional depth myself through tutorials, lab exercises and additional notes. This would still have been impossible without Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, which respectively provided a great deal of information for use in lectures and images for the presentations. I could also refer students to Wikipedia for further reading, rather than trying to fit everything into the lectures. The PowerPoints I created are currently available online here, while Screencasts are available here. To be honest, I think there is a mass of room for improvement, but I was working to a very tight deadline – and I’m happy how well these materials and other changes to the class (including online formative and summative tests and SMS polling in class) were received by the students. In the module review feedback at the end of semester I received probably the highest praise and most positive response from any class I’ve taught… ever.

I may not have deposited any OER into any recognised repository, and I may have only made minimal use of the same, but in using open resources and in sharing what I’ve produced openly online, I made my life easier, improved the classes for my own students, and reached out to an audience well beyond my university campus. Not a bad result, all told.

My short piece for EDUCAUSE Review “Second Life is Dead. Long Live Second Life?” is now online. I’ve had a few emails from different folk, generally in agreement. No hate mail yet

In the same week, I learned that Computer Games and Instruction, edited by Sigmund Tobias and JD Fletcher, is now available. I co-wrote a chapter in this book with Jon Richter on Multi-User Games and Learning – trying to encapsulate this broad, broad area in a single chapter, quite a challenge. The book also contains chapters by James Paul Gee, Chris Dede and Kurt Squire amongst others – so we are in very good company. I’m looking forward to receiving my own copy, but for now I have to settle for scanning the pages available via the Google-books preview (available from the book page, here)

Table of contents below.

SECTION I: INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTER GAMES

Introduction, Sigmund Tobias and J. D. Fletcher

Searching For the Fun in Learning: A Historical Perspective on the Evolution of Educational Video Games, Alex Games and Kurt D. Squire

Using Video Games as Educational Tools in Healthcare, Janis A. Cannon-Bowers, Clint Bowers, and Katelyn Procci

After the Revolution: Game-Informed Training in the U.S. Military, Ralph Ernest Chatham

Multi-User Games and Learning: A Review of the Research, Jonathon Richter and Daniel Livingstone.

SECTION II: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE AND REACTIONS

Review of Research on Computer Games, Sigmund Tobias, J. D. Fletcher, David Yun Dai, and Alexander P. Wind

Reflections on Empirical Evidence on Games and Learning, James Paul Gee

Developing a Research Agenda for Educational Games and Simulations, Chris Dede

Comments on Research Comparing Games to Other Instructional Methods, Marc Prensky

SECTION III: COMPUTER GAME ISSUES

Multimedia Learning and Games, Richard E. Mayer

Action Game Play as a Tool to Enhance Perception, Attention and Cognition, Ashley F. Anderson and Daphne Bavelier

Developing an Electronic Game for Vocabulary Learning: A Case Study, Michael L. Kamil and Cheryl Taitague.

Instructional Support in Games, Henny Leemkuil and Ton de Jong

Implications of Constructivism for the Design and Use of Serious Games, Jamie R. Kirkley, Thomas M. Duffy, Sonny E. Kirkley, and Deborah L. H. Kremer

Implications of Game Use for Explicit Instruction, Putai Jin and Renae Low

Cost Analysis in Assessing Games for Learning, J. D. Fletcher

Using Computer Games to Teach Adult Learners Problem Solving, Joan (Yuan-Chung) Lang and Harold F. O’Neil

Gender and Gaming, Elisabeth R. Hayes

Computer Games and Opportunity to Learn: Implications for Teaching Students from Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds, David Yun Dai and Alexander P. Wind

SECTION IV: EVALUATION AND SUMMING UP

Stealth Assessment in Computer-Based Games to Support Learning, Valerie J. Shute.

Computer Games, Present and Future, Sigmund Tobias and J. D. Fletcher.

This week we have the release of the new school league tables for England. These include the results and league rankings for the new English Baccalaureate which was only announced weeks ago. So schools are already being rated on a new system which they have not been given any opportunity to prepare for. And what is this English Baccalaureate anyway? Well, its a set of different subjects – English, Math, one science, one modern language and either history or geography. If a student passes these five subjects, they have achieved the English Baccalaureate.

Many head teachers are unhappy that the results of this arbitrary new qualification are already in the league table:

ASCL’s Brian Lightman said: “We are in favour of a broad curriculum and for as many pupils as possible to get into the best universities – but education is not just about university entrance.

“This will devalue vocational education and marginalise it.”

The selection of courses that count as a humanity for the Baccalaureate is very arbitrary – Religious Education, Music or Art don’t count. A very academic (non-vocational, non-creative) model is now being pushed for schools while at the same time David Willetts, Gove’s Conservative cabinet colleague, is promoting vocational education as an alternative to academic education for school leavers and considers that too many children may be going to university (e.g. here and here).

That there is no need for, and that government should not support, lots of (unneeded) humanities graduates is a recurring theme of commentators in the Telegraph – so why is history being given more importance as a school subject than art, at a time when creative arts (including animation) are a cornerstone of modern commerce and industry?

I watched this Ken Robinson video again on YouTube. I wish Michael Gove would watch it and pay attention. But given Gove’s brush off of similar complaints that his Baccalaureate undervalues creativity and art, I doubt it would have any effect.