Perhaps you think they only look at folk with top degrees from top universities. Wrong. In fact, you can get an interview without having a degree – you just have to be good (really good) at coding, and be able to demonstrate that.

Say hello to Interview Street:

CodeSprints are coding contests designed to streamline the job hunt for programmers. Instead of blindly applying to companies individually, work on a single set of interesting coding problems to get interview calls from great companies.

I teach on a game programming course – yet one of the key messages that I try to get students to understand is somewhat contrary. That most game companies don’t care about your degree. Unusual amongst the skilled professions, there is a much greater focus on portfolio and being able to demonstrate what you can do rather than reliance on a piece of paper from a university. Being competent and capable – and aiming to be exceptional – at programming and software development is the goal, not the pass mark.

Interview Street now allows major employers to look beyond the certificate, and evaluate what candidates can actually do. So whether you learn software development from a book, attending college, through free online courses, or any combination you can think of, you can compete on a purely meritocratic basis with anyone anywhere from any college.

Will there (can there?) be an equivalent for business skills or other areas of expertise?

With free online courses and materials for learning, and ways of demonstrating skills to employers bypassing the need for certificates of achievement, what is the purpose of universities?

As Coursera’s Daphne Koller puts it (quoted on HackEducation):

“There’s a growing amount of content out there on the Web,” says Koller, “and so the value proposition for the university is no longer simply getting their content out there. Rather, it’s fostering that personal interaction between faculty and students and students and students.”

The only real value proposition for universities is perhaps now in the relations between staff and students. How staff can support students, help them engage with the topics, overcome hurdles that come their way, and to help them find their way after university.

I found myself wondering whether universities are going to experience a (likely painful) rebirth, one that leaves many in a very different shape going forward but with surprising echoes of the very earliest of medieval universities (unlikely as that may seem). It is a while since I read Charles Homer Haskins’ The Rise of Universities,but recall some of the details. Before universities came into being, anyone wishing to study would have to seek out a tutor or master and pay to join his classes. Over time certain towns (such as Bologna) became known for having many tutors, and hence attracted increasing numbers of students. In Bologna, the students who traveled to the town to study formed societies in order to be able to obtain citizen-like rights for living in the city and used these societies for collective bargaining with tutors over how much tutors should be paid and what they should teach. Thus the first European university was formed by the students themselves. (As per usual, Wikipedia has more on this)

When the university was first formed, students would individually and directly pay for their tuition – not to the university, but to each individual tutor. The tutors formed their own association, and over time a form of balance emerged – but with the students in control, as they were the ones paying for services.

Today we have a mix of private and publicly funded universities, but where students generally have very little control – but the emergence of a wider range of options may change that once again. We are also seeing systems emerge which take things back to before the formation of universities: where tutors relied on their individual reputations to attract paying students, without the existence of a university structure to set prices and pay.

Coursera and MITx are where Stanford and friends and MIT are making individual courses available (for free just now) to students worldwide – allowing anyone in the world to learn from the subject experts at these august institutions. These activities are important charitable ones for leading private (and normally quite expensive) universities to justify their charitable status, and help with promoting the institutions and fund raising. And make high quality courses available online for all, of course. In the UK, the Open University still maintains Open Learn, but they haven’t yet turned these into  courses with certificates from the university upon passing yet (AFAIK). They also do not use video based lectures, but the Open University do, however, have huge numbers of videos online on iTunes U.

Many other universities have been posting video lectures over recent years, but the packaging into courses with online assessments and certificates for successful completion/passing mean that these newer courses are becoming more and more like a free alternative to attending university – and one where you can pick and choose your topics and tutors from a growing range of online providers. And the providers may not even be universities.

Some of the pioneering work in developing Coursera is due to Sebastien Thrun, who left Stanford to create his own company, Udacity. Complete a Udacity course and you get a certificate signed by the instructors. As in Bologna before the university came into being, the value of the award is based on the reputation of the tutor (or perhaps the Udacity ‘brand’ value), not on some university seal.

Where Udacity is slowly building up the available range of courses, using only tutors and courses that Udacity deem suitable, Udemy are trying to become the eBay of online learning: anyone can create a course, and anyone can sign up to take courses. Tutors can set prices on courses, and Udemy take a cut of any fees. To attract in users Udemy also provide free courses (including hosting copies of many Creative Commons licensed courses from the likes of Stanford and MIT), and allow users to create free as well as commercial courses.

On Udemy or on personal websites powered by WordPress, Moodle or any of dozens of other possible CMS, tutors will have to rely wholly on their own reputation, while those on Coursera or Udacity will benefit (at least initially) from brand value association. Student led sites which help students navigate the options, to share experience alongside helping form study groups, are already emerging. Aiqus is just one, itself built using freely available open-source software.

As publicly and privately funded free higher education courses become increasingly available, as students become increasingly aware of these options, it will be harder for many existing universities to justify their costs and expense. Top universities will be able to rely on their reputation for some years to come – and a few appear to have found that offering courses for free can help enhance and build that reputation. But not all universities will necessarily survive being reborn into the new age of free and cut priced higher education that is approaching.

So how have things changed?

… erm not great.

What you see is the 10 or so of the items deposited for a Real-Time Embedded Systems course, that received a grant a few years ago to create an OER resource and to share it with the world. Which they did. But they completely failed to give resources suitably descriptive names or make effective use of metadata (or perhaps Jorum simply isn’t showing the useful data it is holding somewhere). I can’t tell whether any resource is going to be a video or audio recording, a set of PowerPoints for a lecture, a lab exercise, a problem sheet or whatever. In many cases I can’t even tell what the actual topic is!

And I still can’t search resources by type – which would be incredibly useful. Until this improves, I’ll be sticking to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons for most of my OER needs, with OER Commons in second place – Jorum could do well to copy how OER Commons lets me filter results by a wide range of criteria.

“the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person”

MOOC use a far more distributed model of learning and interaction, where most of the content is itself generated by the students as they share their learning.

Outside of education, I would say that the closest thing we have to MOOCs are probably Alternate Reality Games – which have been posited as a form of Collective Intelligence. Some (not all) MMO games also require very large scale collaboration (Eve Online is the one that springs to mind).

I was talking about Massively Collaborative systems in my Collaborative Virtual Environments class this week, and seeing this link between MOOC and ARG, I appended some of George’s slides (properly acknowledged of course) to the existing slides on ARG as collective intelligence (Why I love bees: ARG and Collective Intelligence, and below).

I would also say that while I totally agree with George on the key differences between MOOC and the other offerings, and that MOOC are more interesting to think about because they are a genuine attempt to do something different in a different way, I should say that I don’t feel that MOOC threaten the role of teaching universities nearly as much as the likes of Udacity.

Class on Avatar Classroom: Edmund and Fire’s SLOODLE-based classroom, Tuesday March 20th at 8PM Pacific Standard Time

Some people may have heard of the hosted service Edmund Edgar and Fire Centaur have been working on, built on the latest SLOODLE 2.0.

This gives you a pre-fabricated classroom integrated with a fully hosted Moodle website, with all the SLOODLE tools, designed to get you up and running with SLOODLE as quickly and easily as possible.

We have all the usual SLOODLE tools, so you can:

• Upload their Presentations in Moodle, and have them displayed in Second Life with the Sloodle Presenter
• Create quizzes in Moodle, and have students complete them in Secondlife using Sloodle quiz chairs, and the all new Sloodle Scoreboard!
• Create and award points on your scoreboard for quizzes and role-play activities.
• Submit homework assignments in Second Life, and grade them using the Moodle Gradebook
• Distribute Virtual items to the class using a web based interface.
• Record and bridge Student / Teacher chat sessions in Second Life and have these automatically archived in Moodle Chat

We also have a few additional touches, like a shark pool to attack your students if their quiz chairs drop too far.

Fire Centaur will be holding an informational tutorial on Tuesday March 20th at 8PM PST for all those interested.

Hope to see you there!

2nd European Immersive Education Summit

26th and 27th November 2012

École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratif EnsAD (Paris, France)

Important Dates

• Paper submission: 27th July 2012
• Notification of acceptance: 28th September 2012
• Final paper submission: 26th October 2012
• Summit: 26th-27th November 2012

Overview

The theme for the 2nd European Immersive Education (iED) Summit is:

Immersive Education: combining creativity, art and pedagogy

The École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD) in Paris has the mission to provide artistic, scientific and technical training for creative designers engaged in design and research in all aspects of the decorative arts. EnsADlab is involved in research on the creation of artistic and shared online spaces, exploring the aesthetic and sociological implications of immersive 3D environments.

The 2nd European iED summit will build on this theme, exploring how virtual spaces can be used for innovative forms of teaching and learning, fostering creativity and artistic expression. This will be rooted in new technological developments in the fields of virtual, augmented and mixed reality. There will also be a strong emphasis on pedagogy and effective design and evaluation of solutions, with case studies from active practitioners in this emerging cross-disciplinary domain.

One special session will explore the uses of shared online spaces and metamedia as spaces for creation, exposition and artistic appreciation. Some examples are:

• As spaces of live creation (art experimentation)
• As spaces for exposing and represent art (museography & design)
• As spaces for idea exchange and communication (collaborative platforms for artistic and academic community)

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

• Prof. Chris Fowler – Virtual Reality and Learning: Where’s the pedagogy? The School of Education, The University of the West Indies

Background
There is a growing interest in the use of virtual and mixed-reality environments for online teaching and learning. Immersive Education gives participants a sense of “being there” even when attending a class or training session in person isn’t possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides educators and students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience. Originally available only to university students, the next generation of Immersive Education is focused on a broad spectrum of academic and non-academic users (higher education, K-12, and corporate training).

iED Summits are official Immersive Education Initiative conferences organized specifically for educators, researchers, and administrators. iED Summits consist of presentations, panel discussions, break-out sessions and workshops that provide attendees with an in-depth overview of immersive learning platforms, technologies and cutting-edge research from around the world. iED Summits feature new and emerging virtual worlds, learning games, educational simulations, mixed/augmented reality, and related teaching tools, techniques, technologies, standards and best practices.

This summit will address core topics on the use of virtual and mixed-reality environments for online education and training applications. The scope will be fairly broad and will look at a range of innovative uses of virtual reality immersive environments. This could range from using and developing virtual environments through to practitioners with experience of teaching online and developing new approaches and pedagogies, including underpinning theories, human factors, pedagogy and design/evaluation strategies, case studies and more technical/scientific research topics. Submissions that have empirical results derived from virtual or mixed-reality immersive education test-beds are also encouraged.

This is the second summit organised by the newly formed European Chapter of the Immersive Education Initiative (http://europe.immersiveeducation.org), and builds on the success of the previous iED Europe summit held in Madrid in November 2011. See http://europe.immersiveeducation.org/events/ied-europe-summit for an overview of the previous summit and the online proceedings. The European summit complements the international summits that are held in Boston and organised by the Immersive Education Initiative in the USA. (see http://mediagrid.org/summit/).

Topics of Interest includes, 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

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!)

Virtual Worlds III has Craig Reynolds and Ken Perlin lined up for keynotes (two incredibly influential academics, Reynolds work on ‘boids has had a huge influence on agent based AI in games, and Perlin’s impact in graphics has been immense).

No keynotes announced yet for VS Games, but is supported by the EU FP7 GALA network of excellence, so will be guaranteed to bring along many of Europe’s top games and learning researchers.

This point is pretty much the central theme of Ted Nelson’s 1974 classic ‘Computer Lib‘ – with “You can and must understand computers NOW” emblazoned on the cover.

It has resonance today with the flurry of recent activity highlighting the need to drastically improve computing education in the UK – Next Gen and Royal Society reports, recent government statements, and so on.

Appropriately, CodeAcademy have declared 2012 to be the Year of the Code – the year in which everyone should try to learn and program.

Here are some good start points for complete novices:

http://codeyear.com/ – CodeAcademy’s Code Year site. This uses interactive online lessons that build your skills with JavaScript – the scripting language used in web-browsers (and some other places besides).

Even more basic, the School of Webcraft will introduce you to HTML – not a programming language as such, but the basic markup language used to create simple webpages.

One of Stanford’s free courses is CS101, and this will introduce you to some of the fundamentals of computing and will allow you to practice programming online. The course starts in February, so still time to sign up. I think this course will be using Python – another easy to learn, beginner friendly language. The course leader, Nick Parlante, also runs the CodingBat site which has a range of programming challenges that can be completed online to test your skills in either Java or Python.

There are many other free online courses on computer programming, from a wide range of institutions and available through iTunes U, YouTube or elsewhere – but what these courses offer is exercises you can complete online and the opportunity to learn alongside other learners and mentors.

Download here the whole Call for Papers as PDF.

Submission Types

• Full Technical Papers (10-14 pages)
• Short Technical Papers (4-8 pages)
• Poster Papers (max. 4 pages)
• Demonstrations / Interactive Installations (max. 4 pages)
• Industry Full/Short Papers, Posters, Demonstrations (same page restrictions as above)
• Tutorial / Workshop submissions (max. 4 pages)
• Doctoral Consortium submissions (max. 4 pages)

Submissions must be in Springer LNCS format. All submissions will be reviewed by the conference’s international program committee. Accepted papers will be published as technical papers, poster papers, demo papers or extended abstracts. Authors might be asked by the program committee to resubmit their paper in a different category. Extended versions of selected papers will be invited for a special issue of the “Entertainment Computing” journal.

Important Dates

March 10^th, 2012 Workshop proposal submission
April 1^st, 2012 Full/short paper submission
May 20^th, 2012 Notification for full/short papers
May 30^th, 2012 Poster/demo/installation/doctoral consortium submission
June 15^th, 2012 Notification for posters/demos/installations/doctoral consortium
June 22^nd, 2012 Camera ready submission (all submission types)
Sep. 26^th to 29^th, 2012 Conference: University Bremen, Germany

Topics

We invite authors to submit original papers, posters or demos in all areas of Entertainment Computing including (but not limited to):

Technologies for Entertainment Computing

• Computer Graphics
• Digital Audio
• Human Machine Interfaces
• Artificial Intelligence
• Integrated Development
• Computer, Video, Console and Internet Games

Design and Creative Environment

• Game Design
• Interactive Sound
• Graphic Design
• Art and Novel Media
• New Genres of Entertainment Technology

Advanced Applications and Platforms

• Augmented, Virtual or Mixed Reality
• Ubiquitous / Pervasive Entertainment
• Entertainment and Ambiant Intelligence
• Robots and Cyberpets
• Mobile Entertainment
• Self-Reflecting Entertainment Computing

Application Domains of Entertainment Computing

• Games / Serious Games
• Interactive TV and Cinema
• Edutainment
• Authoring and Communication
• Healthcare
• Simulation
• Digital Entertainment and Sports
• Digital Entertainment and Pleasure
• Games for Special Audiences / User Groups (elderly, childern, people with mental or physical disabilities)
• Human Computation Games

Theory

• Impact of Entertainment Technology on Users and Society
• TransMedia, Art and Entertainment
• Methodologies, Paradigms, Tools for Entertainment Applications
• Narratives / Digital Storytelling
• Social Impact, Social Networking, Sound and Music

Technical Papers

Technical papers are the main medium for presenting new research results to the community at ICEC. Submissions should describe novel unpublished work relating to one or more of the topics listed above.

Papers must be submitted in the Springer LNCS format (see below). Papers must be written in English. As to account for the expected variety in submissions to this multidisciplinary conference, paper lengths may vary within a certain limit. Short paper submissions have to be between 4 and 8 pages in length. Full paper submissions have to be between 10 and 14 pages in length. In any case, reviewers will be instructed to judge the contribution of a paper relative to its length. Typical contributions presenting significant research advances/results should be around 12 pages in length (Full Technical Papers). Contributions presenting more focused approaches/results should be around 6 pages in length (Short Technical Papers). Papers with exceeding length relative to their contribution will be rejected. All papers will be reviewed by the ICEC 2012 program committee. Accepted papers will be divided into two categories, long presentations and short presentations. The committee may accept papers conditionally or for a different category. Authors may be asked to either shorten or lengthen their paper accordingly. Authors may also include a video (optional) in their submission. Video files should be at most 50MB in size. See the general submission information for more details about preparing your submission.

Posters

Posters provide an interactive forum in which authors can present work to conference attendees during special poster sessions. Posters provide an opportunity to describe new work or work that is still in progress and will be more lightly reviewed than papers. A poster submission should be in the form of a four-page paper in Springer LNCS format, describing the research problem, contribution, and value to ICEC attendees, submitted as a PDF file. Authors may also include a video (optional). Video files should be at most 50MB in size. See the general submission information for more details about preparing your submission. Posters will be displayed on cork boards during specific sessions. We expect to be able to accommodate posters of up to 3 feet by 4 feet (portrait format), so we suggest using that size or smaller. Additional details concerning the poster format will be made available following author notification.

Demonstrations and Interactive Installations

Peer-reviewed demonstrations show early implementations of novel, interesting, and important entertainment computing concepts or systems, or can serve to showcase commercial products not previously described in the research literature. At the ICEC, demonstrations also encompass interactive works of art or installations of interest to the entertainment computing community. Demonstrations should be brief, so that they can be shown repeatedly. We particularly encourage demonstrations with which attendees can interact. A demonstration or installation submission consists of: 1) an extended abstract that should be no more than four Springer-format pages in length, 2) an accompanying video which should be at most 50MB in size, and 3) a supplement document with a list of a) technical requirements including electrical and connectivity needs and b) space requirements including display and footprint needs. By default, demos will have a table, chairs and internet connection available. By their nature, interactive installations are intended for larger, potentially public spaces. We will try to accommodate for the needs of these types of installations, but please include a minimal set-up so that we know the range of requirements that we will need to meet. Successful demonstration/installation submissions will be contacted by the chair to confirm the availability of the requested resources. The abstract, digital video and requirements supplement must be submitted electronically.

Industry Papers / Posters / Demonstrations

Industry papers, posters, and demonstrations are intended to increase the knowledge transfer between academia and industry in entertainment computing. While regular contributions are mainly reviewed for their scientific novelty and contribution, industry papers should focus more on practical solutions and results that are of immediate interest to the industry or especially facilitate communication between industry and academia. Possible examples are (but are not limited to):

• Novel and interesting applications (both commercial and non-profit)
• New frameworks, tools, or libraries
• Business models (especially for serious games)
• Development best practices
• Novel input devices

Industry contributions should follow the same guidelines as regular contributions in terms of layout, pages, additional material etc. (see above). We specifically invite industry members to consider submitting a poster or demo to present live working systems.
If you work in the industry and would like to make a submission, but you are not used to working with scientific paper templates and publication procedures, please do not hesitate to contact us for assistance.

Tutorials / Workshops

We invite proposals for workshops that will be held in conjunction with ICEC 2012. We invite proposals in all areas of entertainment computing (see conference topics listed above) and particularly welcome proposals that will focus on and promote discussion on new and emerging trends. Workshop proposals are restricted to four pages in length (in the Springer LNCS format) and must include the following information:

• Contact information (name, affiliation, address, phone number/fax, and email) of the workshop organizer(s)
• Relevant CV information of the workshop leader(s)
• Workshop title
• Workshop objective
• Background/relevance of workshop topic
• Expected workshop outcomes (publications, activates, “take-home” skills development, etc.)
• Names of potential workshop participants and expected number of participants
• Workshop due dates (schedule of submission and review of submitted material for your workshop)

Workshops can be scheduled for either half a day or a full day (please indicate your choice). Please submit your workshop proposal via the electronic conference system.

Doctoral Consortium

The ICEC 2012 Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for doctoral students to explore and develop their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers. We invite students who feel they would benefit from this kind of feedback on their dissertation work to apply for this unique opportunity to share their work with students in a similar situation as well as senior researchers in the field. The strongest candidates will be those who have a clear idea and an area, and have made some progress, but who are not so far along that they can no longer make changes. Also, as well as stating how you will gain from acceptance, both you and your advisor should be clear on what you can contribute to the Doctoral Consortium.
The Consortium has the following objectives:

• Provide a supportive setting for feedback on students’ current research and guidance on future research directions
• Offer each student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from researchers and students outside their own institution
• Promote the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research
• Contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events

Current graduate students pursuing a PhD project who would benefit from detailed workshop discussions of their doctoral research should submit a single PDF file consisting of:

1. A 4-page extended abstract of your thesis work in Springer LNCSformat. Clearly specifying:

• Originality of the work with respect to current concepts and techniques
• Importance of the work with respect to fundamental issues and themes in entertainment computing
• Results to date and their validity
• Contribution of the work (expected and/or achieved) to entertainment computing

2. Your CV
3. A one-paragraph statement of expected benefits of participation for both yourself and the other consortium participants (i.e., what will you contribute as well as gain).

Submission Guidelines

Papers and abstracts should be submitted through the submission web site in PDF format. All materials will be reviewed and processed electronically. The information about the work and a contact author’s email address, mailing address, and phone number must be submitted through the submission website by the deadline (see above). Submissions should not be anonymized for review. Movies or other materials can also be submitted through the submission web site. The movies must not exceed 50 megabytes in size. Any additional materials must also be received by the deadline. All submissions will be reviewed by the ICEC 2012 program committee.