Group items tagged

June 21, 2011, 8:00 am By Prof. Hacker Lewis Carroll's logic game[This is a guest post by Anastasia Salter, Assistant Professor at the University of Baltimore in the school of Information Arts and Technologies. Her academic work focuses on storytelling in new media; she also writes the Future Fragments column for CinCity. Follow her on Twitter at AnaSalter.--@jbj] "...With that said, perhaps the most important takeaway from LEEF is that it's not all about expensive toys. Learning games don't have to be hi-tech to be effective. There's a lot to be learned from Space Vikings, the conference's ARG-that's alternate reality game, not its augmented reality cousin. Unlike augmented reality, which requires technology to mediate an environment, alternate reality is a playful imposition of story onto a physical space. In Space Vikings, a number of us dedicated conference attendees were drawn into a mission to save our tribes from a "pedagogical wasteland." How did we accomplish this feat? By hunting down "anomalies"-read masking tape clues, QR codes and posters-with answers to questions to submit in a digital educational games theory scavenger hunt. This is just one example of a conference ARG, and designers were at LEEF to report on lessons learned from others like DevLearn's Zombie Apocalypse. (For more ideas on educational uses of Alternate Reality, check out Think Transmedia.) These same ideas can scale and transform to a number of settings. For example, Melissa Peterson's Elmwood Park Zoo ARG is currently a project conducted with paper (though imagined for smartphones), and it's already doubling the engagement time of visitors to the local zoo. And on the other side, games like the Giskin Anomaly in Balboa Park are adding new layers of narrative to a popular and culturally rich tourist destination. And these games don't have to be location dependent. Case studies like the Radford Outdoor ARG Outbreak, a social inquiry game that puts st

Executive Office of the President Council of Economic Advisers Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology September 16, 2011 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Educational technology holds the promise of substantially improving outcomes for K-12 students, but there are significant challenges in bringing new educational technology products for this population to market. It is difficult for producers of these technologies to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products to potential buyers and market fragmentation creates barriers to entry by all but the largest suppliers. The spread of broadband Internet and Common Core State Standards have improved the landscape for educational technologies, but these factors alone are likely insufficient for a "game changing" advance. Working together, stakeholders can form a plan of action to provide local school systems with easy access to good information about the effectiveness of various educational technology products and give prospective developers of these products access to customers on a scale sufficient to make it worthwhile for them to enter the market. The payoff - in the form of more effective and more widely utilized educational technologies, leading to better outcomes for students - could be enormous.

by Mike Masnick Wed, Jun 1st 2011 " ...the bill tries to also define what constitutes a potential felony crime in these circumstances: the offense consists of 10 or more public performances by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copyrighted works So yeah. If you embed a YouTube video that turns out to be infringing, and more than 10 people view it because of your link... you could be facing five years in jail. This is, of course, ridiculous, and suggests (yet again) politicians who are regulating a technology they simply do not understand. Should it really be a criminal act to embed a YouTube video, even if you don't know it was infringing...? This could create a massive chilling effect to the very useful service YouTube provides in letting people embed videos."

Not "News" per se (June 1st) but source of ongoing other discussions, e.g. in gaming sites