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Role-playing simulations are frequently claimed to be effective pedagogical tools in the teaching of international relations (IR); however, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence on their classroom utility. The assessment of simulations remains mostly anecdotal, and some recent research has found little to no statistically significant improvements in quantitative measures of academic performance among students who participated in them [for example, International Studies Perspectives (2006), vol. 7, pp. 395; International Studies Perspectives (2008), vol. 9, pp. 75–89]. Scant research has been conducted on how role-playing simulations might affect students' perceptions of the instructor's teaching. This paper investigates whether a simulation had statistically significant effect on students' exam scores in an IR course or on student teaching evaluation scores.

For a long time, columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback was instant, personal, and brutal.

The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness.

The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy

It is more useful, and perhaps more complete, to see virtual worlds, games, and simulations as points along a continuum, all instances of highly interactive virtual environments (HIVEs).

The ease with which the children in the pool, the students in the virtual class, and the pilot in the flight simulator move from exploratory virtual-world behaviors to structured but simple games to taking on rigorous simulation challenges illustrates both the differences across these three instances and the connections that link them. It is only by building from open experimentation to increasingly rigorous rules, structures, and success criteria that children learn transferable water survival skills and pilots learn critical flying skills.

A virtual world will not suffice where a simulation is needed. The virtual world offers only context with no content; it contributes a set of tools that both enable and restrict the uses to which it may be put. An educational simulation may take place in a virtual world, but it still must be rigorously designed and implemented. Organizations routinely fail in their efforts to access the potential of virtual worlds when they believe that buying a virtual world means getting a simulation. Likewise, a game is not an educational simulation. Playing SimCity will not make someone a better mayor. Some players of, for instance, World of Warcraft may learn deep, transferable, even measurable leadership skills but not all players will. The game does not provide a structure for ensuring learning. Just because some players learn these skills playing the game, that does not mean either that most players are also learning these skills or that it should be adopted in a leadership development program. Conversely, a purely educational simulation may not be very much fun. The program may have the three-dimensional graphics and motion capture animations of a computer game, but the content may be frustrating. Specific competencies must be invoked, and students' assumptions about what the content should be, likely shaped by their experiences with games, will be challenged.