Group items tagged

"Interactive books are everywhere, and have revolutionized the way people consume the printed word. With the recent software available to allow easy creation of interactive books and with the race to bring these products to market, there seems to be a more and more dilution of quality and a loss for the meaning of interactivity." ...And will they engage a larger group of readers than traditional flat text does? (Would love to see a study)

Will great professors start defecting to interactive media, where they could become media stars? I wonder how truly interactive or engaging this type of delivery is.

This is not entirely education focused, but interesting interactive experience of blending the physical with the digital world in an engaging way for an information/data driven society.

Jeremy Bailenson from the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (Stanford) talks at the Berkman Center about how the use of avatars fundamentally alters communication styles both in virtual and real world settings. (Includes video and slides)

Note the first listed winner in the (empowering) education category: involved with use of interactive games to enhance learning in math and science.

This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

This author makes arguments against buying iPads for children. At one point he states, "iPad isolation can lead to poor social skills at a time when kids are just learning how to interact with each other."

Piazza is a Web 2.0 tool that allows students to ask questions and engage in dialogue on the Internet with teacher and each other.

EIM (Excellence In Motivation) announces the addition of two new modules to its recognition and incentive suite of solutions. EIM's Learn 'N' Earn and Interactive Incentive Games will be unveiled to the public at the World at Work Total Rewards Conference in Orlando, FL, May 21-23, 2012.

This is a really new way to incentivize or gamify some mundane processes in corporations. I can see this having an impact. .

I am posting two articles: 1) Apple's recent announcement (here) and 2) the criticism (above) by Hack Education blogger Audrey Watters This article is about Apple's announcement to "reinvent the textbook" around the iPad. "The message: it's going to be a lot easier in the future for publishers and educators to create a new generation of interactive textbooks."

An an interactive digital textbook powered by a student-created system called FLOW. "The Cachalot app, powered by FLOW, allows students to take notes, highlight text, tweet at content experts and perform Wolfram|Alpha searches without leaving the screen. (David Johnston/Cachalot)." Also interesting for T565ers about academic project turned down by publishing houses.

GAMES & CULTURE is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by Sage Publications. It includes theoretical and empirical research about games, culture and innovation using interactive media.

Learn about the gamification of the university experience at RIT's School of Interactive Games & Media. I learned about this at a MIT talk on Civic Games, which was written up here: http://civic.mit.edu/blog/mstem/event-writeup-civic-games. They only really touched on motivation, autonomy, and rewards, but the transcript is also worth checking out for the names of people, books, and sites mentioned.

I forgot to point out the interesting use of RFID in Just Press Play.