Following up a blog post by Tom Scheinfeldt on using Twitter as an outreach tool, I recently came across a service under development called Edmodo. Billing itself as “Twitter for teachers and students,” Edmodo is in alpha testing as a social educational portal, including a classroom-calendaring feature. Based upon the screen capture of [...]
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) was instrumental in not only deploying the earliest computers into public schools in Minnesota, but also developing software that would become nationally popular like The Oregon Trail computer game. A window into the past, I’ve come across an oral history interview with Dale LaFrenz, the founding assistant director of [...]
By now you’re probably familiar with college courses being taught about Youtube or in Second Life, but last Thursday began something new: a college course taught at Stanford University on Facebook applications. Cramming over 100 students into a temporary classroom, professor BJ Fogg wrote the following in the Stanford Persuasive Technology blog about his [...]
In another move to distance themselves from their college-oriented roots, Facebook has removed their “courses” feature that allowed students to indicate what courses they’re taking and the profiles of their classmates. On the Facebook Developers blog, they announced:
Facebook will be phasing out its Courses feature in early August, and we wanted to make sure [...]
Unrealistic uses of Second Life:
The University of New Orleans plans to continue instruction in Second Life in the event of another Katrina-like disaster. I’m highly skeptical that this would work on such a large scale; I’ve never thought that Second Life or virtual worlds are the solution to learning, but they offer new methods of [...]
The Oregon Trail computer game’s gender bias is narratively implicit, but visually explicit. Users control a character that is never textually referred to as a specific gender, however its visual representation is indisputably that of a male figure. In the game, the wagon leader makes the decisions along the journey and is presented as male, [...]
Using the new Facebook platform, several libraries have established a presence by creating applications. These applications are added by users and allow information to be displayed within Facebook’s website — even a user’s profile. Michigan, UIUC, and Ryerson U have all led the pack with the earliest of these academic applications.
While these [...]
Several years ago McGill University created a simulation designed to teach students about the history of a Quebec. The simulation is free to download on their site. (Windows only.. sorry Mac users! [myself included]) One of the largest problems with the educational use of computers simulations is a lack of augmentative [...]
Virtual Powwow was a living museum in Second Life, proposed as a final project in Bernie Dodge’s graduate-level Exploratory Learning through Simulation and Games class. By recreating a powwow, the simulation visualized an environment hosted by Native Americans where students could experience Native American culture and dance.
Although not exactly roleplaying, Virtual Powwow and [...]
Rob MacDougall recently posted a pre-history of roleplaying games that thoroughly describes its origins in far greater detail than my previous post on early war gaming and Wild West roleplaying. Studying Wild West roleplaying simulations in Second Life I’ve continuously asked myself where this pattern of behavior came from, and why people represent themselves in [...]