We’re really happy to be sponsoring BarCamp Madison which is coming up July 26th and 27th. It’s exciting to see these types of activities going on in Madison. For the techno-enthusiasts among us, we know that there is a strong tech community in and around Madison, but one that tends to be fragmented.
There are lots of exciting startups like Networked Insights, NovaShield, Ohigo, Flying Cart in addition to the local Drupal heads and game companies, but the community rarely comes together for geekery like this.
Through the hard work of people like Abraham Williams, Blake Hall, and many others I’m sure; events like BarCamp and Web608 are creating a terrific tech culture in what is already a great city to live in.
Go register today!
I returned to the Games, Learning & Society 4.0 conference in Madison at the end of last week. An all around terrific conference run by the smart people in the Education Department here at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
The speakers and attendees of this conference are largely trying to put “education” on its ear and change the way students not only learn, but are evaluated. They all see the benefit of games as a tool for learning and teaching. However, their research goes well beyond simply adapting text books to games. The argument being made by James Gee and others is that through game play, individuals are constantly learning through exploration, content creation, creativity, and open problem spaces. Situational game play forces players to understand a great deal of logic at times, not to mention causal relationships between game elements or even other players.
The conference included researchers as well as practitioners who subscribed to these benefits at some level as a means for engaging students and teaching a new form of literacy. I look forward to following up with many of them to provide access to Sharendipity in their classrooms and after school programs.
More detailed conference analysis can be found from some of the GLS insiders…
… in addition to the online session webcasts.
The Game Developer’s Conference is getting started! You can follow our activities this week on Twitter @sharendipity.
More to follow…
The Sharendipity crew is heading to San Francisco for the Game Developer’s Conference during the week of February 18th. We’re looking forward to another great event.
Please let us know if you’ll be there and would like to get together. We’d love to share stories and show off some of the exciting things we’ve been up to.
I spent the end of last week enjoying the Games, Learning, and Society Conference in Madison, WI. Educators, researchers and a smattering of corporate folks came together to discuss how games are being used to enhance one’s learning experience.
The most compelling content for me were the case studies where IT staffs and game developers discussed their experiences building games for specific educational purposes (as opposed to the faction that builds games of their own design - without the direction of a particular teacher or course). Two of these stories are right here in our backyard - Filament Games and the ENGAGE project in UW-Madison’s DoIT team.
Dan White and Dan Norton of Filament Games made a couple of great points about building games in this space. First, they highlighted the fact that it’s more important to provide problem spaces for students to explore than it is to present raw content. The text books do the latter just fine. Second, a successful project needs to find efficient and effective means to link the designers with the subject matter experts (teachers). Without that, the output misses the mark just like it does in other software domains.
If there was any doubt about whether or not there was an appetite for new games in education, the ENGAGE team squashed it. They seemed to be overwhelmed with projects. The UW-Madison campus is filled with professors eager to add new learning tools to their courses. What they seemed to lack were tools, however. They went after each new project with a clean piece of paper and long development cycles.
Although I would never describe us as an educational software provider, we’ve always felt that our platform offered terrific opportunities for learning. After attending GLS, I’m very optimistic that this learning community can take advantage of the blend of interactive and creative elements in the platform. Not only has it proven to be a fun vehicle for building applications, but we are beginning to see that one of the most powerful aspects of the platform is the ease at which new ideas can be prototyped. Either through the re-use of components already available in the community or simply by taking advantage of the interactive nature of the environment. Try, fail. Try, fail. Try, succeed! It’s beginning to feel as if the act of application development is in itself a game!
Some of my takeaways from GLS…
- everyone needs tools that help bring the subject matter experts closer to the game/content designers
- everyone needs tools to quickly prototype ideas
- there is a void of tools that let the students become part of the lesson creation (one exception to this would be the MMOG environments like Second Life)
- unlike a lot of art-driven game design, the computer CAN be used in the design if it is interactive
One of the nice things about the blogosphere is the ability to quickly and easily get perspectives from others that participated in the same events. For more analysis from the GLS natives look here…
You can also check out the talks yourself on Sonic Foundry’s Media Site (this year’s content has yet to be posted)
