Slashdot reports that George Mason University’s game development BS degree enrollment is going gang busters. They expected 30 enrollees and got 200! The school’s new bachelor’s degree in video game design is the only 4 year program in the DC area.
While researching information for an upcoming manuscript, I came across a link to the Canadian Institutes of Distance Education Research (CIDER). This group addresses a broad range of topics including: learning and teaching application, financial and issues of access, the strategic use of technology in distance education settings, and other factors that influence distance education in Canada.
The CIDER Sessions are a collection of presentations for teachers and learners in the 21st Century. Several sessions address aspects of teaching and learning in virtual environments. In addition to the lectures, there are links to many other resources (powerpoint slides, mp3 recordings, journal manuscripts, etc.).
An excellent resource. Check it out.
The Duke Chronicle reports that Duke University will start using the iPad on a limited basis for classes in the fall 2010 semester. The school’s Instructional Technology group only expects about 6 professors to trail the platform.
I would hope interest picks up once more “HD” educational applications are available for the platform.
NPR reports California’s 75 community colleges have multi-year waiting periods while CA hospitals can’t fill 10,000 nursing positions. Some of the educational resource bottlenecks are high fidelity simulation labs. This highlights the need for new methods of training health care workers.
This is a great video of a cute 2.5 year old using the iPad. Maybe this should be the test audience for all user interfaces. If it’s not intuitive enough for a toddler, go redesign!
The Institute of Emerging Issues (an NC Think tank) named NCSU Digital Games Research Center co-director, Michael Young, the 2010 Glaxo Faculty fellow.
The program is to provide the incentive, mechanisms and support for faculty to apply their expertise to current public policy issues.
Scroll to 58 seconds in this video from Penguin books on planned iPad content. The Human Body Anatomy book with 3D simulations of the heart looks interesting.
-Michael
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The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a division of the National Institutes of Health has awarded, Dr. Lynn Fiellin, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, $3.9 million over five years to develop and study a video game to teach children to avoid risky behaviors associated with HIV.
Following development, the game’s efficacy will then be tested in children 9-14 in New Haven, Conn.
Each year the New Media Consortium along with Educause Learning Initiative publish a report on trends in educational technology. The preview of this report is now available online. You can follow the deliberations choosing the topics on their WIKI. The full report will be available in January 2010.
- Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less
- Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years
- Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years
Published in Science last week….
What Can Virtual Worlds and Games Do for National Security?
V. S. Subrahmanian and John Dickerson
Second Life, World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs have become hugely popular consumer games. The military has used computers to study war for close to 50 years. Although there have been attempts to use off-the-shelf games to train our military (see Doom goes to War), they fall flat in their inability to incorporate real-world models of terrorist activities or sociopolitical groups. World of Warcraft allows players and groups of players to fight with one another, but fails to model the circumstances leading up to the battle.
The military is now using virtual worlds that allow defense analysts and military leaders to bring their expertise in-world, incorporating complex, multifactorial background information into the game models. The models allow the analysts/leaders to explore the response to and eventual outcome of strategic decisions.
The models are not perfect. The infinite number of potential responses could quickly make the model unwieldy. Scientists counteract this complexity by limiting each branch point to choices of the highest probability.
Commanders can walk through virtual environments to see how potential decisions might play out. This allows them to consider both the strength and weakness of each decision well in advance of real-world implementation.