With our increasing focus on Game Based Learning, each week sees us sharing interesting articles and resources about Game Based Learning on varied social networking platforms. While many of you follow us on Twitter and Facebook, we do realize that keeping a track of all the tweets/ posts, given the high proliferation and dynamic nature of information, is difficult, to say the least.

Hence, to ensure that you do not miss out on all the great links we share and also with a view to building a knowledge repository, every week, we shall be publishing a quick summary post of our best shared material from the week before.

Came across this really interesting article about gamification at SAP. Definitely worth a read.

SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe is saying “If I look at how my kids are consuming software, if it’s not desirable immediately, they throw it away. Can you imagine what happens to your IT landscape when these people come into business?”

Stumbled on this cool article from IGN earlier today that lists ten trends in gaming ten years from now. It attempts to describe briefly what games we’ll be playing in ten years time. Sony Entertainment (a big publisher of games) invited several leading game-makers to discuss what video game development will look like in a decade.

The list in the article was based on their discussion. Very interesting, take a look.

I spent close to a year laboring under the delusion that game based learning was all about incorporating course material into a game. After all, what else could it be? If I incorporate all the course learning objectives into a game setting and keep score – it qualifies as game based learning doesn’t it?

No! It doesn’t!

Research suggests that if learners are able to score and win the game without learning, they are more likely to do so. So what conclusion can we draw here?

It’s been a trying time of the year; erratic schedules, vacations and finding time to introspect has meant I’ve not blogged over the last month or so. As I get back on track, it’s time to start blogging in earnest again. We’ve gone from attending eLearning conferences to mLearning conferences; it’s just around the corner from mLearnCon 2011. As mobile computing becomes mainstream, it is worth thinking about the nature of learning in the future. As technology permeates our daily lives and goes on to become an essential part of it, the impact promises to be far-reaching.

I came across a challenge posted on the Innocentive website titled – Games for Health: Inspiring Adolescents to take Control of their Health. This challenge was posted by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N). The purpose of the challenge is to seek ideas for the design of a video game that would inspire and empower kids with chronic diseases to become more engaged in managing their own illnesses.

From my first space themed set at age six, into the Technic range in my teens and twenties, I continue to indulge my fascination for Lego brick sets. I’m what is termed an AFOL – Adult Fan of Lego; I believe it had and continues to have implications for how I structure my thoughts and activities that involve work & play. I’ve written before that play is significant for learning through what seems like an abnormally long human childhood (for an animal our size). Oftentimes, I attribute my few creative skills to extensive play, building with Lego being a substantial part of it.

January was a month of varied topics. From Games to Instruction Design, to eLearning and Microlearning, it squeezed out every bit of knowledge from our best bloggers.

Talking of bloggers, it was also a month where we saw two of our team members jumping onto the blogging bandwagon – Aneesh Bhat and Abhijeet Valke . Two guys with immense potential, I promise you. You can look forward to some hardcore ID gyan from Aneesh, while Abhijeet would be the one feeding you with your weekly dose of the best of Learning, Technology and Media links .

So without much ado, lets get on to our collection of the top 12 posts for January, each accompanied by a quick brief.

I’ve been obsessing about the design of games lately and have attempted to study some of the patterns of good games. First off, these observations are driven mainly by the games I’m playing on and off currently – Patapon 1 & 2, Crysis, the Sims 3, Civilization 5, Angry Birds, and Need for Speed. Of these, Patapon is the one I’m enjoying the most as I compete against my six-year-old, and more so because it’s a very quirky, interesting game that runs on a portable platform with a very cool game mechanic.

I came across an interesting blog-post by veteran LucasArts and Telltale Games designer Dave Grossman describing how gaming’s limited appeal could come down to some very basic assumptions we make about the audience versus the actual thought processes of that audience. You can view the blog-post here.

In continuation to our weekly roundup of the best links shared on Twitter and Facebook, here is a collection of our top 15 links from the last week, each accompanied by a quick brief.

1. 7 Predictions for the Gaming Industry in 2010
The video gaming industry made great strides this year. Here are 7 predictions for what to watch in 2011.

2. The Ultimate iPhone Guide: 60+ Essential Resources
The iPhone had a great year in 2010. Here’s a roundup of all the iPhone coverage this year.

A very popular myth surrounding game-based learning is that it involves learning through video games. This article showcases The Healing Blade, a card game which is slowly gaining popularity among medical students in the United States.

The Healing Blade is a card game that teaches budding Med students the ins and outs of infectious disease. It was created by two doctors, Francis Kong and Arun Mathews, who founded the game company Nerdcore Learning.