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This SOB used Facebook to explain his reasons for taking his son's and his own life. Make no mistake this guy has some serious issues. Still, it is noteworthy that Facebook and other social media outlets (youtube, flickr) have been used by the public and authorities to intervene and prosecute people that broadcast their criminal actions and intent. Think about it, George Orwell's vision of the future had the authorities constantly policing and monitoring citezens, but this has not been the case. Instead, we the people, ourselves are the ones monitoring each other via ubiquitous content creation and social media sharing.

This article is really bad, but it makes a couple good points, which I highlighted for you. You're welcome!

A new study published in the March issue of the Psychological Bulletin suggests that exposure to violence in video games may not have huge consequences.

Healthcare facilities are discovering that practicing in the virtual world can have major benefits in real life. Doctors, nurses and students are using online community to learn how to cope with crises, boost clinical skills and make their facilities more efficient.

A video game is being created in the UK "that will engage and immerse young people in learning about democracy and the role of Parliament in scrutinising the government, representing the public, and making laws."

Very disturbing findings. Here's a quick excerpt: "There is still debate over whether scientific collaboration leads to better results. Jonathon Cummings, an associate professor of management at Duke University, and his colleagues got a grant from the National Science Foundation to look at 491 research collaborations funded by the foundation. They discovered something unsettling: Collaborations of more universities fared worse than projects primarily executed at a single university. More collaborators meant fewer patent applications, fewer published papers, and less chance of the group seeking additional funding to keep projects going." "Dr. Cummings says it appears that the amount of coordination required to make progress on research-everything from setting up meetings to integrating knowledge among group members-outweighed the potential benefits of collaboration. In the wake of the study, he says, the science foundation now requires grant applicants for some programs to detail how they expect to manage the collaboration."

Author Jane McGonigal will be speaking this Tuesday at 7:00pm at the Harvard Book Store (1256 Mass Ave.) If you can't make the program the store manager said that they would post a video of her talk on their website shortly after the talk.

By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. In his talk, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

Yes, indeed. The ideal is to intrinsically integrate. That's a good idea. Why not? In fact, maybe the alternate reality games qualify as "real world" layer over games because in such games, whatever happens in games impact the reality in certain ways. We could also design games to work the other way around, e.g. a diet game, where only when you do exercise in a gym in the real world, can you advance levels in the game.

Haha yes!! I recall a rowing machine which actually had a game in front of users so that they could compete with 'other rowers'. It was great and definitely made the workout more fun. I stopped though after a friend slipped his disc on the machine...

Saw it in H561's discussion! Interesting idea! 

Nothing is hotter in the education world right now than the massive open online course, or MOOC. MOOCs make an elite education available to anyone, typically for free but without course credit. But how completely can online courses reproduce the college experience? Lexington writer and entrepreneur Jonathan Haber wanted to find out.

Continuing the discussion of how to make online learning count towards actual degree credits, the ACE accreditation service I described yesterday provides colleges and universities the means to judge whether a course taken by one institution (or taken online) is equivalent to a course taken locally.

Interesting article about games and values. In the middle, the author suggests that for game designers, it is important to get people who aren't like them to play the game. This would make for a more inclusive game.

"Popcorn Maker makes it easy to enhance, remix and share web video. Use your web browser to combine video and audio with content from the rest of the web - from text, links and maps to pictures and live feeds"

Grockit makes Test Prep products for the GMAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GRE and other university admissions tests.

"Intel won't actually manufacturer the product, but it will offer the design license for free to any company interested in making it." Maybe the first open source hardware example I've seen. Will be interesting to see what, if any, effect this has on the ed tech tablet market.

Some very interesting deliberation on the meaning of the Khan phenomenon. I found some resonance with Prof. Dede's comments on the radio.

This is a fairly old paper (1980), but is a comprehensive look at a lot of ideas we covered in class.

If computers can score writing, of course the first use will be for assessment. No surprise there. But how might we use this more creatively?

I tried to bring an scoring software program into my school. Nobody liked it except for myself. I thought the objective measure would be more motivating to students. But the other teachers thought that the students should have more practice with rubrics themselves. My school focused heavily on peer editing and scoring. Also, when teachers see such a large number of average scores they tend to disbelieve the results. For example, when I score the essays, there may be a lot of 'B's but I've sees the difference in between Betty's 'B' and Joe's 'B'. The grade is more of a reminder of my experience scoring Betty's writing. When the software scores it, I haven't necessarily seen the essay therefore the score doesn't mean as much. Of course the scoring makes much more sense for official assessments. Open Ended Responses are a much better measure of a student's understanding than multiple choice, if the software is able to distinguish the nuance of language. Some programs are scoring grammatical patterns, sentence length, and paragraph length; therefore, a student can be totally off topic and get a high score. I'm curious if this latest software corrected for this.