I have been thinking about penning this one for a couple of weeks now, but just couldn’t do sooner. And as I worked on this one I realized some of them have already faded away from my memory. So I had to rely on the session videos put up on Game Based Learning website and my own notes from the sessions. Also in order to make it happen I would be putting my Day 2 recap in 2 or 3 parts covering the sessions I liked.
1. Social media & workplace performance matrix – Harold Jarche takes Jane Hart’s case study resources and puts them in a matrix, made accessible to all through Google docs spreadsheet. Definitely worth a look to see who’s trying social learning in the workplace and the results they’re seeing.
Trawling through my feeds earlier this weeks I came across this link-up post by Ricard Nantel over at the Workplace Learning Blog pointing to a blog post on Harvard Business Publishing about six social media trends.
Worth a quick recount:
It’s been an interesting start of the week, with the tiny Regifting game going viral of sorts within our office. Hit the jump and you’ll see just why.
http://www.regiftable.com/regiftingrobinpopup.html
Soon after I posted These are Not Serious Games on the blog and as a discussion on Linked-In, there was a flurry of comments over a couple of days that quickly covered some thoughts about Serious Games.
Recently I’ve been consulting with a customer on the design of a series of digital learning games for sales training. Most clients have done their research online about serious games, and find the whole gamut of samples, demos, etc. Clients typically have some thoughts about what they feel are serious games and whose game-play and mechanics they intended to emulate. Just one look at their collated ‘portfolio’ was enough to tell me that none of the content in the portfolio was really a serious game. What followed was the diplomatic squashing preconceived ideas about what serious games were in their (client’s) training context.
Last month Tony Karrer posted this interesting piece on the Business of Learning on his blog – eLearning Technology. It provoked a discussion on the topic with many different perspectives brought to bear.
We picked up something from ICT results on 24th June – more amazing stuff that’s changing the way we interface with computers. This time it’s emerging from Cogain (Communication by Gaze Interaction), an EU-funded project under eInclusion tasked to use expertise on interface technologies for the benefit of users with disabilities.
When writing the whitepaper about Casual games, I did a fair bit of research and looked at several hundred web links. While doing so, I documented a few of the better ones. I’d been mulling posting these to the blog. So here they are – a Top 100 Learning Game Resource list. If you are already developing learning games, these links will broaden your horizons, as they did mine. If you are contemplating beginning – it might help to look at links that interest you to get some grounding ideas.
I was digging through some older GDC related posts during the course of some research yesterday. In a keynote that Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata delivered to a packed house at this year’s Game Developers Conference. He mentioned the “Four I’s” that Nintendo uses as a standard for the games it develops.
While we spoke about putting the board games created during Upside’s board game creation exercise up for download, it’s taken us a couple of weeks to get here. Designing, prototyping, developing and play-testing a board game is one thing, packaging it for everyone to play is another. The individual who was lucky enough to convert it from physical prototype to a printable version learned much about game design while creating the PDF.
If you’re on Twitter and have missed Spymaster – where in the world have you been? All the rage last week, you’ve probably seen the many #spymaster tweets from tweeps in your network. You’re into it, or just plain confused about what the objective of the game is; either way, there’s no way you can ignore it’s huge presence on Twitter.
