iterativelearning

One of the recent Floss Weekly episodes features an interview with Nichole Yankelovich of Open Wonderland. Open Wonderland is an open source, Java-based toolkit for creating virtual or immersive environments, and one of the specific audiences they target is education.

Because it’s a toolkit, instructors or schools can customize it to meet their specific learning needs. Another advantage appeals to those concerned with privacy. Because it runs behind a firewall, teachers don’t really have to worry about cyber-bullying or other sorts of pernicious behavior that students may have to contend with in more open virtual world environments such as Second Life. Shu Schiller has an interesting article on this article when using Second Life within the context of an MBA-Information Systems class. However, that said, schools or educators can work around this issue by getting a Second Life premium account for about $10 and so in the end, I guess it kind of boils down to one of those common software trade-offs: do the development work in-house and reap the benefits of greater customization, etc. or go with what amounts to a hosted option with less flexibility.

TechTrends has a good piece on virtual gaming and instructional design (Atusi Hirumi, Bob Appelman, Lloyd Rieber, and Richard Van Eck). It’s a great and timely article, but one of the more interesting sections is when they get to the design section. With the ADDIE model as their general framework, they bifurcate the design phase where the game designers work on things like side quests, obstacles, challenges, and puzzles and the instructional designers focus on developing Learning Task Maps that specify enabling and prerequisite skills needed to achieve the overall goal.

They move on to discuss how the relationship between goals and objectives can be more fluid than with many traditional design projects because game designers may want to develop a challenge that is directly related to the goal.

I haven’t had much of a need to read up on international cell phone plans, but recently, I began collaborating with another grad student who’s in Namibia, Africa, and unfortunately, there’s no AT&T coverage, and so using our iPhones to call and text is an impossibility on a student budget (at least as far as my Googling as been able to uncover). Ideally, it sure would be nice if there would be a special ‘international researcher rate.’ Maybe this could happen through some sort of cooperative pool of universities from around the world? I guess today I’m feeling infused with optimism.