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Found this in doing research for my HT500 presentation. Some foreign language teachers are installing the Sims in foreign languages and having kids play the game to develop their vocabulary. Teachers can use community-created game modding tools to edit text in the game, adding extra words and vocab lists. Because this is a game about everyday life, kids learn everyday vocabularies. Cool idea! I wonder if this would work with any other video games.

Interactive tv Perhaps educators could have an impact if they coordinated?

This is a really interesting and cool idea. I know that Disney's intense storyboarding model in its 'golden age' relied on months and sometimes years of collaborative, co-creation of a story between 10s-100s of people. And their decline in quality is often attributed to adopting a one-author/screenwriter process (The book: The Illusion of Life, Disney Animation; by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston talks about the company's process with lots of beautiful illustrations, how-to advice, and historical narratives..). What will happen when the general public, with potentially 1000s to millions of viewers put their minds together to evolve the best story?

This article describes a virtual environment, which has hypergridding as a feature. Students can teleport from one community to the next. This was the first platform to do that.

I wonder how popular environments like this are right now, and how they are being implemented into classrooms. This is fairly recent.

To what extent should videogames be used in classrooms, and what is the research support for this?

Note the author characterizes the National Educational Technology Plan as a "manifesto." Quoting this article, "... in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet "aggressive goals" and "grand" challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a "new kind of R.& D."

A bunch of especially interesting quotes toward the end: "This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise...refers to as 'failure-based learning,' in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary... According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita...children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal.... 'They'll fail until they win.' He adds: 'Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It's completely aspirational.' It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today's public schools. 'If you think about kids in school - especially in our testing regime - both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,' he says. 'That's pretty much a guarantee that you'll never get to truly deep learning.'"