Ever so often I get asked what’s so great about games and learning using games. An answer I use just as often is that it’s all about ‘play’. In this video Dr. Jaak Panskepp talks about his research into play and its benefits. While in this context it doesn’t directly tie to eLearning, I felt this tiny video would be interesting to post to our blog. Take a look:
While we written about Microsoft’s Project Natal in the past, the interweb has been abuzz about a start-up from Israel that’s going to compete – Omek.
Their technology claims to “translate natural body motion into seamless 3D movement onscreen”.
The technology is claimed to be ground-breaking; you can judge from yourself; take a look at the videos.
With 29 new posts, April has been the most active month on our blog. And we do realize that some of you would want to get a quick summary post at the end of the month that lists which ones were hot. So here’s the first of our monthly roundup posts that we intend to put up every month now.
We talked on various topics in April – from LMS to Augmented Reality, from Games to AS 3.0 Resources.
As games continue to establish themselves into our daily lives, the future as we know it will not be the same. They don’t just hold the power to influence our life, but also have great implications for Learning.
Below are a few interesting talks from TED’s past, focusing on games, which are sure to get you thinking.
Recently during one of our discussions about the way individuals work and learn, we debated whether humans are inherently capable of multi-tasking, or is it a singular task at any point in time, but are capable of rapid switching of attention from task to task. As a general search on the web will reveal, there is quite a debate about multitasking and task switching.
I’ll be making an online presentation about the fundamental differences between games and simulation at 11:00 AM IST on 24th April, 2010. The event is being hosted by IDC India which is a community of practice for instructional design professionals in India.
The presentation is meant for beginners, and will help them draw lines between simulations and games from a learning and learner experience perspective.
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.
I attended the two day conference on Game Based Learning held earlier this week in London. This was the second edition of the conference and had a decent 400+ delegate presence. There were some sponsors too and but very few stalls in the exhibit hall which was disguised as the experience lounge. Overall I was quite pleased to have attended the two day conference. Here are some of my impressions of the conference.
Over so often I get asked what fundamentals of game design apply to the design of learning games – a very difficult question to answer that. In my opinion, every sort of principle ever used in the design of commercial video games applies to the creation of digital learning games as well. My opinion is that game design can’t really be reduced to a set of guidelines that instructional designers can follow to design games that teach. I’d even go so far as to say that game design is more of a philosophy than anything else, once you imbibe that philosophy the gaminess starts to permeate all your design, it fundamentally changes the way you think about user interface and experience design.
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.
