About the Educational Gaming Commons

 
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Virtual Worlds Image

Welcome to the Educational Gaming Commons (EGC) and Virtual Worlds Community Hub. This is a place where Penn State faculty, staff and students working with educational games and virtual worlds can communicate and collaborate. The EGC is an initiative coordinated by Education Technology Services at Penn State.

The site is divided into several areas:

There are several ways to use this site:

  1. Anyone can view pages without signing in.
  2. If you want to post to the any of the forums, you need to sign in to this site with your Penn State Access Account ID. All forum posts are posted in the front page. Note: Users from outside of Penn State can create a Friends of Penn State Account.
  3. If you want a blog, to create a new forum, or to create and edit Book (wiki-style) pages for different projects, contact gaming@psu.edu.

2008-09 NMC Virtual Learning Prize

Fri, 05/16/2008 - 14:06 — Brett Bixler

The New Media Consortium (NMC) announced today the call for proposals for the 2008-09 NMC Virtual Learning Prize, a $100,000 competitive program of awards intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences that make use of the unique attributes of a virtual learning environment. (See the press release.)

As many as 20 NMC Virtual Learning Prizes will be awarded in 2008. Each of the US$5,000 awards will provide a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create the learning experience. The range of inworld services available to awardees to actualize the proposed ideas includes professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services.

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The NMC is committed to pushing the boundaries of how we collectively view teaching and learning in virtual space. The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is envisioned as a way to surface and realize creative ideas for how to make optimal use of a virtual setting, using a process that provides recognition, financial incentives, professional development services, and a return for education as a whole.

"Projects funded under the NMC Virtual Learning Prize program will be those that make learning fresh or novel, or that illustrate concepts that are usually very difficult to teach," explains Dr. Larry Johnson, NMC's CEO and director of NMC Virtual Worlds. "We are seeking immersive learning experiences in particular, as well as tools that support the craft of teaching. We hope to see a number of proposals with broad applicability across disciplines as that will allow us to maximize the reach of the shared resources that are to be developed under this program."

As a requirement of funding, all materials and content produced as part of the program will be licensed for broad use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Proposal authors will retain full copyright to finished products, and all funded materials will be made available to educators and educational institutions at no cost via either the NMC's Educational Resource Center on Learning in Second Life or via the NMC's website, as applicable.

For the 2008-9 award year, funded ideas will be limited to those that can be implemented in the virtual worlds of Second Life or Project Wonderland. In future years, the program may be expanded to other virtual world platforms.

Review of proposals will begin on June 16, 2008, and proposals will continue to be accepted until all funds have been expended.

For further information, or to download a proposal submission form, please see the Virtual Learning Prize website. Questions related to the criteria or the submission of an application should be directed to virtual-learning@nmc.org.

A game to cure HIV?

Thu, 05/15/2008 - 17:17 — bkp10

A game developed by University of Washington PhD students, with help from game designers, aims to help move medical science forward through folding proteins. The game is called Foldit, and by playing it maybe someday you'll be credited for finding the cure for HIV.

Comic Books for Education

Thu, 05/15/2008 - 08:27 — Brett Bixler

I just read an interesting Edutopia article about comic books in education. I've been curious about this for years - a prof. at PSU into Manga gave a talk pre 2K that sparked my interest.

More recently I puchased Comic Life Deluxe for the Mac - a comic book layout program in essence. Using it, you can develop your own comics. You still have to create your own artwork, but all else (frames, text bubbles, etc.) is just a click away.

Second Life and other virtual environments are one way to obtain your artwork. Fantastic scenes abound, and characters, outfits, poses, etc. are cheap and easy. The Global Kids Project did just this to great effect.

Sound great, but what's missing here? Web 2 integrated into the process. Imagine a program that combined Comic Book Deluxe with a Google Doc-like interface. Students could come together in a participatory creative endeavour, using a medium that speaks to them to build great things. How cool would it be to work with others across the world to create an artistic story that teaches?

I'm keeping my fingers crossed here!

Convergence of the Real and Virtual - A Scientific Conference Held in World of Warcraft

Mon, 05/12/2008 - 06:42 — Brett Bixler

This from the Second Life Educator's List Blog, courtesy of Alan Levine:

http://www.sl-educationblog.org/?p=116

The conference is now over. I hope the big green guy got to present!

Weblins - Add an Avatar to your browsing experience.

Thu, 05/08/2008 - 09:17 — Brett Bixler

See http://fleeep.net/blog/2008/05/08/weblins-another-transitional-step-to-3... for this fascinating new technology. Basically, you have an avatar that travels with you as you browse. It appears on the bottom of the page. The exciting thing is if other people are using Weblin, and they are on the same page, you can converse with them!

Fleep describes how this can be used in Course Management Systems. I had another idea - what a great way to jazz up an asynchronous discussion forum by setting a date/time for all to come to the forum and, well, discuss the topic? You could capture the conversation as posts in the forum AS THEY OCCURRED, turning it into a synchronous, chat-like event. We all know that forced chats don't work well. Will Weblins make a difference?

Spielberg and Family Video Games

Wed, 05/07/2008 - 07:30 — Brett Bixler

Read all about it! Fascinating. It's great to see Speilberg involved in gaming, because I believe he is sincere about making games for the family, and he is of course quite creative. He's also smart - there's lots of money to be grubbed here! I'm off to sniff more out about this "secret" gaming project he's working on. I hope they do keep it under wraps until it's ready, however - the world doesn't need more vaporware Spore-hype.

NMC 2008 Survey of Second Life Educators

Tue, 05/06/2008 - 18:51 — Brett Bixler

This is a direct copy of a post by Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium:  

Last year the New Media Consortium conducted and published the results of a survey of educators in Second Life. Given how much has changed and evolved, they have decided to run the survey again.

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We announce today the opening of the NMC 2008 Educators in Second Life Survey, which you can take now by going to:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB227S75R6YXA

Please share the survey link far and wide, as we hope to get a larger sample this time around. We will keep the survey open at least til the end of May 2008 and we will again publish the results to the NMC Campus Observer and the NMC web site.

Like last year, the the results are and will be available for free under Creative Commons licenses.

Even if you took the survey last year, please participate again (as much can change in a year). And tell everyone you know to put in their responses.

Great BusinessWeek Slideshow on Business Use of Virtual Worlds

Tue, 05/06/2008 - 07:26 — Brett Bixler

See http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/05/0505_ceo_guide/index_01.htm . This is a great reference for anyone talking about virtual worlds and what businesses are doing right now.

There's also a podcast at http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/guide_to_tech/guidetote...

Nintendo in Second Life? Whee, er, Wii!

Fri, 05/02/2008 - 09:10 — Brett Bixler

See http://gigaom.com/2008/05/01/whats-nintendo-doing-in-second-life/ for this breaking story.

It does look like we'll have a variety of input devices to activate our jerky avatars by this time next year.

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