Wow!

These are some fun games to be used with young students. Civics (formerly Our Courts) is a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in our democracy.

Here's a link to the debate about the Three Strikes Your Off policy that Doctorow discusses in his interview.

I Came across this copyright timeline yesterday. Gives a good synopsis of some famous cases and how they brought about changes in the law.

Here's a wiki that aims to educate students on digital responsibility and to become good digital citizens. There are a lot of good links to specific lessons for students.

I thought this was an interesting case where privacy wouldn't matter...I posted it in this week's discussion as well.

We all just missed the 8th Annual Games for Change Festival held in NY last week....but here's a description of the workshops that took place. On the Demo page you can see some game samples...unfortunately, there's no link enabling you to play...

Mary had mentioned "Smart Communities" in one of the class discussions, which brought to mind this very cool teen website that I discovered last semester, called YouMedia, designed to support and develop media literacy skills......

Posting this to test Diigo...also because it was a GREAT find - a current study that provides information for both my digital storytelling project AND my group project on ethics....Here's a summary of what it's about. Also was wondering if "Sribd" is another sort of Diigo? The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, present Findings From current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The Reports result from research projects funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of its $50 million initiative in digital media and learning. They are published openly online (as well as in print) in order to support broad dissemination and to stimulate further research in the Field.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118039138?categoryid=13&cs=1&cmpid=RSS|News|LatestNews

For many small cinemas in Europe, the high price of digital conversion equipment makes digital upgrading unaffordable.

I never realized there were so many categories of games. Check out the video about the piano staircase, designed to get more people to take the stairs. It's an example of gamification, creating a game that encourages people to buy a product or to behave in a particular way.

I've been having some technical problems starting a new link to a US Depart. of State sponsored Serious Games Conference, so here it is: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/05/164134.htm Further down the page is a link to live streaming of the conference. It really is starting to look like serious business..!

I was looking for a definition on this term, "Augmented Reality," which came up in my searching yesterday, when I came across this Common Craft video explaining it. Some of this stuff just blows my mind!

This Newsletter has many relevant articles on the topic of innovation in education. "Technologies to Watch" and "Game-based Learning" were particularly interesting. "Augmented Reality" is another interesting not-so-futuristic technology that makes me think, "Jetsons here we come!"

This is a newsletter about the virtual education movement as it confronts state politics, as chronicled in the "Liberating Learning Wiki Project." According to one report, NJ has been approved for two virtual H.S. in the next two years.

Just came across these fairly recent article on Danna boyd. (yes, that's lower case 'b.') She's been involved with some pretty interesting online studies that focus on teen and young adults. Some of her research has included topics such as, "Online White Flight," "Digital Self-Harm," and Privacy Techniques." I found it particularly interesting that on the topic of Digital Self-Harm, she discovered that vicious anonymous questions on a teen's profile weren't examples of cyberbullying but were posted by the teen herself!

I felt like I hit the jackpot when I found this article on eSchool news. A company called 3D Game Lab offers workshops to teachers on how to design/incorporate games into their curriculum. As the article says, lessons learned from "Worlds of Warcraft" are applied to the design of games that cover school curriculum topics. Check out the link to the company and the You-tube video.

Elisa - I agree with you. I also think that just as necessary as training teachers, is getting administrators/directors of curriculum on board with the idea...! I think that's the bigger challenge...

If you don't have time to read, there's a video about the new school. I thought this was going to be a "distance learning" sort of school, but was glad to see that they simply have prioritized integrating technology into the school. This article is from 2009. I wonder how well the school is doing two years later?

While searching web 2.0 and social software applications in K-12, I cam across this interesting article about how the success of gaming is based on perceptions of teachers. This idea of "perception" I becomes really important when trying to implement new technologies in schools.

This was an interesting video that was introduced to me last semester in Digital Libraries. The creators of Monty Python came up with a very clever way to turn the tables of having so many of their videos "ripped off." Instead of the public posting bad poor quality versions of their videos, they provide a collection of their videos themselves, along with links to purchasing them!

I often get frustrated by my 77 year old mother, who recently got a nice new computer (under much pressure from her daughters), but has a lot of reluctance about using it. This journal (iJETS) had many articles such as this one, that I believe could shed light on tactics to motivate this segment of society.